Director’s Message

The 2005-2006 year has been a very busy one for WCET staff and many of our members. Our annual conference planning and registration was well underway when Hurricane Katrina devastated our host city, New Orleans. Not only did WCET staff and members work to assist our Louisiana members, but they also managed to move the entire conference to San Francisco. The conference was a mix of excitement and sadness. Most of the Louisiana delegation was unable to attend and we missed them. However, those members that were able to attend used the occasion to do some fund-raising that resulted in a check sent to our Louisiana colleagues.

As you will see in the following report, we began a new partnership this year with the Observatory for Borderless Higher Education that is housed in England. Our joint benchmarking project allowed several WCET members to compare their management practices around the integration of IT and e-learning with sister universities in the U.K. and Australia. The partnership will be repeated for next year as well.

WCET staff members have been very busy with projects that are outlined in this report. Some of these were designed to help individual institutions or states, and others are likely to have wide impact on the field of higher education.

This is the last time I will have the opportunity to write something in this report to our members. After almost 18 years, I shall be stepping down as the executive director of this extraordinary organization, whose members really do help one another. Despite the general trend in higher education toward more competition for resources and more proprietary information, the ethic of WCET has endured and certainly will under new leadership. It has been a joy and a privilege to serve as your executive director, and I shall take all the lessons I have learned from all of you into my new life on a university campus.

—Sally M. Johnstone