The Hispanic Educational Telecommunications System (HETS) will offer a workshop to get together academic leaders and key staff of the institutions that make up the Consortium who are interested in establishing partnerships with other institutions to develop online studying programs. The workshop on Collaborative Distance Learning Initiatives will take place at Herbert H. Lehman College in New York, on June 17 and 18, 2003, at the same time as the HETS Board of Directors meeting and the Consortium’s tenth anniversary celebration.
During the workshop the participants will be able to study the collaborative model of the Great Plains Alliance Program, under the Kansas State University. Following this model, HETS will create an action plan to develop and implement collaborative programs and online services for students, among the Consortium member institutions that are partners in the Learning Anywhere Anytime Partnerships (LAAP) Project. The workshop will be lead by Dr. Sue Maes and Mrs. Dawn Anderson, both of whom are part of the Great Plains Alliance staff. Beginning in August, HETS will distribute $75,000 among the best proposals received from groups of two or three institutions willing to collaborate during the 2003-04 academic year. The programs and online resources will be accessible through the Plaza Virtual portal (www.virtualplaza.org).
Simultaneously with the workshop, the HETS Board of Directors will hold its administrative session and it will celebrate the Consortium’s tenth anniversary in the evening of Tuesday, June 17th. During the event, HETS will present several awards to outstanding member institutions and corporate partners to recognize their support of Consortium initiatives over the past ten years. Presently, sixteen university presidents and chancellors, and more than forty representatives of member institutions have confirmed their attendance to these events in New York.
HETS is the first telecommunications consortium to serve the Hispanic community through education at a distance. Eighteen autonomous higher education institutions from the United States, Puerto Rico, and Colombia, all certified by diverse academic accreditation agencies, make up the consortium. Founded in 1994, Great Plains Alliance is an organization that joins various U.S. universities and academic programs that specialize in the Human Sciences. For more information about this, please can contact Dr. Nitza M. Hernández, HETS Executive Director and LAAP Project Director, at her email: nhernandez@virtualplaza.org.