Call for Mission Statement Review and Enhancement

Please review the following mission statement and offer any suggestions or edits you feel would enhance our purpose statement:

Our mission of Distance/Flexible Education SIG is to provide a platform for dialogues regarding alternative and innovative teaching and learning opportunities from the traditional face-to-face classroom environment. Such alternative learning opportunities exist largely due to the rapid development of web-based technologies, including but not limited to course/learning management systems, open source software, social media, as well as various advanced multimedia technologies that offer synchronous and asynchronous, audio and visual, oral and written communications. Thanks to such technology affordances, we now have a wide range of flexibility and choices, from online to hybrid and to face-to-face, in order to obtain knowledge and communicate with our teachers, peers, and students anytime and anywhere, 24/7/365, and become true life-long learners. To facilitate the dialogues, we invite graduate students as well as faculty members to join us in research to explore and expand learning opportunities beyond imagination.

Activities include:

~Sharing among group members the current research, practical models, resources, materials for the continued improvement in quality and access of distance/flexible education

~Developing and maintaining an online presence to facilitate communication, publicize our mission to SITE membership, and provide a model of flexible education

~Communicating with other SIGs and SITE leadership to refine our mission and activities

~Serving as reviewers for relevant submissions to AACE

~Disseminating our SIG’s work beyond SITE at other professional organizations

~Examining opportunities for research and grant support in the area of distance/flexible education

Please send your edits to KL10@txstate.edu or you may offer them on our WordPress blog site: http://sitedistanceflexiblesigblog.wordpress.com/ via "comments" by April 15, 2015.

Also please join our current blog about investigating instructional design professional development models in higher education!

Thank you, Kathryn