President's Message

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The Canadian Association for University Continuing Education (CAUCE)

– providing a forum for sharing, research, and development since 1954.

Welcome to the Canadian Association for University Continuing Education (CAUCE).  As the president for 2009-2010, I take great pride in the organization’s 56 year history and the increasingly prominence of university continuing education during the current challenges that we face in our economic and employment worlds.
 

Over the last two years, my predecessors (Marilynn Booth and Andy Cochrane) have focused their annual themes on raising the visibility of our students and our profession (2007-2008), and enhancing our capacity for collaboration to address needs (2008-2009).  Both themes continue today and into the future.  In 2007-2008, Turning Up The Volume documented personal stories of the impact of the programs that our members provide.  This year, we shall explore our ability to further enhance our visibility and that of our students by engaging in further discussion with the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada (AUCC) to determine how to best collect and report data on continuing education students in Canada.  Doing so will help AUCC and CAUCE to act as the voice of these students for policy purposes and allow us to better communicate internally and externally about the volume and importance of our services.  
 

Our Past-President, Andy Cochrane, has generously offered to continue to take the lead on exploring opportunities for CAUCE member institutions, wherein we may join together to provide the capacity and breadth to develop and implement programs to meet requests nationally or internationally.
 

In addition, as our institutions and CAUCE both struggle with ever tightening budgets, it is increasingly important that our financial and organizational priorities are aligned.  During my presidency, I would like to be able to enhance our ability to be responsive to our members’ diverse and changing needs.  To do so, we need to clearly understand the needs of people who differ widely in their professional responsibilities, institutional focus and professional interests.  That isn’t an easy undertaking, nor will simply asking you once achieve our goal.  To that end, on May 20th (at the beginning of the national conference in Vancouver) we launched our CAUCE Institutional Member Survey.  The purpose of this survey is to gather complete and current information about their interests and needs from the professionals who make up our association.  The mission of CAUCE is to support deans, directors, senior administrative professionals and practitioners (for example, in program development, program management, instructional design, marketing and other similar roles).  Following in the footsteps of the University Continuing Education Association (UCEA) and the Association of Continuing Higher Education (ACHE) south of the border, we plan to implement this survey every two to three years to ensure that we have current data upon which to base our planning.   
 

Our executive and committees are extremely eager to hear from you and to use this first round of input to plan relevant and accessible services to meet the needs of the diverse professional groups that make up our membership over the next couple of years.  As adult educators we are all intimately familiar with the importance of building educational programming on a solid understanding on the needs of our audience.  Certainly, our conference and professional development committees feel the same way about designing continuing education opportunities for you.
 

CAUCE continues to benefit from having capable administrative support from the Secretariat at the University of Saskatchewan, as well as the organizational memory, history and wisdom of Bob Cram.  Further, we also benefit from the long relationship with the University of Alberta as the host of our Journal.   Over the next year or so, the Journal will take on a new form with enhanced accessibility and functionality as it moves from paper to electronic format.
 

On behalf of the Executive Committee and myself, I look forward to representing your interests over the next year and encourage you to be in touch with any questions, suggestions or feedback.
 

Kindest regards,
 

Tracey Taylor-O'Reilly
President (2009-2010)
 

Director, Centre for Continuing Education
McMaster University
Phone: (905) 525-9140 ext. 23325
Facsimile: (905) 546-1690
Email: ttaylor@mcmaster.ca