Going back to e-volunteers tasks, I sometimes think that we tend to believe that e-volunteers are some kind of second-best volunteers: if you can’t get a “real” one, get yourself a virtual one: this is completely wrong.
Here at the Campus for Peace we’re planning to set up three virtual courses about Macromedia multimedia design applications: Dreamweaver, Flash and Fireworks. These courses will be given for free to the NGO working with us.
This will be done the following way:
- An e-volunteer, with a pedagogical profile, will coordinate the whole thing, including course programme, e-teachers, and content
- Three more e-volunteers, experts in the applications to be taught and with some expertise and/or training in e-learning, will teach each one of the courses
- Content and learning materials will be supplied for free by the University
- e-Learning platform and management will also be supplied for free by the University
- It is possible that we add two or three people as tutors or sort of technical backoffice supporting e-students in their way through the virtual campus, not a complex tool but neither that simple
The courses will be, a priori, followed by 60 to 100 people all around Spain and/or Latin America… at zero cost (in fact, near zero cost: personnel costs are paid by the University cooperation for development programme and e-volunteers will “pay” their own costs ;)
Thus: still think e-volunteers are a second best? Imagine how would you do this and where in Earth will you raise the required funding from.
If you need to cite this article in a formal way (i.e. for bibliographical purposes) I dare suggest:
Peña-López, I. (2004) “e-Volunteering tasks in e-Learning projects” In ICTlogy,
#5, February 2004. Barcelona: ICTlogy.
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Volunteering for PEOI, I found it’s more difficult to be an e-Volunteer.
– You can get a project in just 2 clicks, so it’s easy to get in, harder to keep up.
– Flexibility and loose schedules of online tasks might easily lead you to give way to your real-life activities
– Some can get easily distracted when working on a computer connected to the internet.
– it can quickly get boring, especially if you already have a job where you do a lot of computing.
It also requires more dedication, to feel involved with an somewhat abstract project you never really saw but on web pages or emails.
So indeed, online volunteers are real volunteers, which need very different skills to field volunteers.
Hey, Laurent,
I completely agree with your comment. My post was about the “demand” side of the e-volunteer, i.e.: can they accomplish the same tasks?
In the “supply” side it is absolutely true that motivation, organization and so is the most difficult barrier for e-volunteers, as it happens with on-line students in our University and their following virtual courses whilst having a job and a family and social life and… ;)
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