Most Friday mornings Mike Petersen, Laura Hunter, Lisa Kuhn and I meet in a staff meeting. It's usually fairly informal and serves as a time for us to catch up with each other and tackle some of the big picture issues at UEN. It's also been a good way to get to know each other a little better.

This morning Lisa, UEN Accounting Manager, told a fun little story. We spend a great deal of our time and resources running classes across our network at UEN. It seems that stakeholders have continued concerns about the facilitators that are employed to monitor these network based classes. Since most of the classes involve High School students it is imperative that there is adult supervision at each site. And since the whole point of EdNet is distance learning, there aren't always good options for providing this supervision.

Lisa recently received a call from Jim at the College of Eastern Utah. Jim was concerned about a situation that had recently come to his attention. A student had been facilitating a High School class being carried on the UEN system. We needed to be aware that this was happening. Who knows what bad things were going on during the class. Lisa was called because Jim wanted to make sure that no financial hanky panky was going on. Lisa promised to follow-up.

Well, Lisa quickly called the High School to chat with this student/facilitator. What she found out was certainly interesting. It turns out that the "student" is a Sixty-some-year-old Lady who is trying to get here GED. She and another Sixty-some-year-old lady are taking the classes together. She assured Lisa that neither of them have been cheating. They are very careful about taking the tests and fairly passing their courses. I don't think that other problematic, teenage, behavior is causing distractions, either.

This is a cute little story that made all of us laugh. It's great to see the diversity in students that benefit from classes on our network. And it's good to know that Jim is conscientiously monitoring what is happening in his classes. We need to make sure that marauding grannies are held in check while finishing up their high school degrees. It's too bad that all of the problems of the world aren't this innocent.

That's all for now..........
10:21:22 PM    comment []