A webinar on the IEEE’s Continuing Education (CE) offerings was organized on the 2nd of November, 2011. The organizing team was comprised by Saurabh Sinha, IEEE R8 Technical Activities Vice-Chair, Steve Welch, Director of CE, Educational Activities Division (EAD), Niovi Pavlidou, IEEE R8 Lead Volunteer for Continuing Education (Educational Activities Subcommittee (EASC)), and Alex Torres, Product Manager of CE Programs, EAD.
The seminar was offered to relevant officers in Region 8: Section Chairs, Chapter Chairs, Region 8 EA officers, the Chapters Coordination Subcommittee (ChCSC) and several interested (invited) members in the Region.
The duration of the webinar was one hour, the lectures and discussion slots as a whole.
Saurabh Sinha welcomed the participants and introduced various subcommittees relating to technical activities, including educational activities in Region 8. Niovi Pavlidou described in brief the scope and the first activities of the newly formed CE team in Region 8. After that, Steve Welch, with the assistance of Alex Torres, covered topics to key CE offerings. The scope and services and offerings of CE includes the Education Provider’s Programme (http://cep.ieee-elearning.org), the IEEE Webinar Platform (http://info.ieee-elearning.org) based on the Blackboard collaborate Platform, through which the same webinar took place with full of success, and on the IEEE eLearning Library (http://ieee-elearning.org/) were presented in detail.
After the presentation a questions and answers slot was offered to the participants.
Besides its content, the event offered a valuable experience for assessing the quality and friendliness of such collaboration in very dispersed environments in time zones, mother languages and actual infrastructure.
The webinar has been recorded and can be viewed offline at:
http://ieee-elearning.org/outreach/course/view.php?id=960
The attendance is considered as moderate, since this was one of the first trials for webinars on the offerings of IEEE and ways to promote future participation in similar events are examined.
Prof. Niovi Pavlidou
IEEE R8 Lead Volunteer for Continuing Education
IEEE Greece Section Membership Development Officer
IEEE VTS&AESS Joint Greece Chapter Chair