AAA Policy Discussion: Authorization, Accreditation, Access

Janet Poley is CEO and President of the American Distance Education Consortium (ADEC). She develops collaborative distance education initiatives and conducts research and education programs related to technology access and applications with more than 60 land-grant university members and international affiliates. She is in the International Adult and Continuing Education Hall of Fame and on its Board of Directors and Treasurer; is a Board member and Treasurer of Sloan-C; is member of the Creighton University Health Sciences Distance Education Advisory Board and is a member of the Board of Advisors for Zamorano University in Honduras.

Dr. Poley received the Mildred B. and Charles A. Wedemeyer Award for Outstanding Practitioner in Distance Education in 2000. She served as principal investigator on a $5 million National Science Foundation grant for advanced networking and applications including work on distance education and digital libraries in China. She was a Co-PI on an NSF start-up program in Human Language Technology – a collaboration between U.S. and Moroccan institutions. She manages the USDA funded Agricultural Telecommunications Program; manages a cooperative agreement with the National Agricultural Library (NAL) of USDA and the Universidad de Concepcion (UDEC) in Chile; is the chair of the NAL AgNIC Board of Directors; and has received several Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and U.S. Department of Commerce grants.

Dr. Poley serves on the Editorial Board for the American Journal of Distance Education; is a liaison to the National Association of State Universities and Land Grant Colleges (NASULGC); was a member of the Penn State Advisory Board to the World Campus Initiative; was a member of the Great Plains Network Advisory Committee; and is a special member of the University of Maryland Eastern Shore Graduate Faculty. She is a professor in the College of Journalism and the Institute of Agricultural and Natural Resources at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. While Director for Communication, Information and Technology (CIT) at the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), she served on the NSF Networking Council focusing on education and outreach. In 1994, she was named by Federal Computer Week as one of the 100 outstanding information technology leaders in government, business and academia. She has worked in more than 40 countries, serving six years in Tanzania and received the Excalibur Award from the U.S. Congress for that work.

Dr. Poley is the author of a number of journal articles, book chapters and presentations on information technology and distance learning and currently authoring a book titled “Building an Inclusive Future for Learning: A Practical Guide for Campuses and Communities”.

Bruce N. Chaloux, past president of the Sloan Consortium, directs the 16-state Electronic Campus initiative of the Southern Regional Education Board. The Electronic Campus, the South's "electronic marketplace" for distance education courses and programs, has grown to include more than 10,000 credit courses and 500 degree programs from more than 300 colleges and universities in the region.

Prior to assuming his duties at the SREB in 1998, he served in the Graduate School at Virginia Tech for 13 years, including four years as Associate Dean for Extended Campus Programs at the institution’s main campus in Blacksburg and earlier for nine years as Associate Dean and Director of Tech’s Northern Virginia Graduate Campus in suburban Washington, DC. He earlier held positions on the staff of the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia and as an academic affairs administrator and faculty member at Castleton State College (Vermont).

He has earned his Ph.D. in Higher Education Administration from Florida State University in 1979 and has business degrees from the University of Florida (master’s in 1972) and Castleton State College.

Dr. Sue Day-Perroots, Dean of Extended Learning at West Virginia University

At WVU, Day-Perroots currently provides leadership for academic outreach including an instructional technology resource center, online and on-site courses, as well as non-credit programming. She was the impetus behind two successful entrepreneurial models for online and Summer Session that increased enrollments and fiscal return to Colleges. Dr. Day-Perroots served as 2010 President of the North American Association of Summer Sessions.