The Electronic Village Online

A Project of TESOL's CALL Interest Section    

What is the EVO?

The EVO is a set of online sessions that takes place every year from mid-January to mid-February. Sessions include a range from simple discussions to virtual hands-on workshops. They can serve as a run-up or preview to the TESOL Convention, or a discussion of an issue in the field of teaching language, or experiments with and pedagogy of new technology tools.

An online session is the perfect venue to pre-discuss papers from Academic Sessions or Intersessions, or to carry on a discussion of topics  important to your member group. EVO provides an invaluable service to teachers all over the globe, for it brings the  Convention to those who cannot travel. We usually have over a thousand participants, both members and non-members of TESOL. Most sessions also offer live chats (text and audio/video), including Webcasts from the Convention, and all participants are welcome to any of these live events.

Two articles describing EVO:

Yeh, A., Rogers, S.,  Philp, H., Chattopadhyay, K., Arena, C., & Stevens, S. 2011. The Electronic Village Online provides free professional development annually. TESOL-Italy Newsletter, June-July 2011: 9.

Hanson-Smith, E. & Bauer-Ramazani, C. 2004. Professional development: The Electronic Village Online of the TESOL CALL Interest Section. TESL-EJ, 8(2).

For those wishing to offer an EVO session

An EVO session needs a moderator (co-moderators are preferred) and sponsorship from a TESOL Interest Section, Forum, E-Group, Affiliate, or other TESOL entity; or, in line with the CALL-IS's recent closer relationship, sponsorship by an IATEFL Special Interest Group (SIG). Usually, your home IS or SIG is a good sponsor, but we hope to involve all of TESOL's and IATEFL's member entities. We will help you find a sponsor appropriate to your content if you need help. (Please let us know early in the training session.)  

NOTE: At least one moderator must be a TESOL or IATEFL member.  

The moderator(s) will spend 4 weeks in  the fall learning how

• to run the session interface
• maintain a healthy and productive discussion or workshop
• create an explanatory course syllabus
• foster an online learning community

In other words, those who offer sessions will receive training in how to be  effective online moderators.

Successful completion of the training is of great personal benefit to the moderators and can lead to other opportunities in online teaching. Both lead moderators and co-moderators must participate in the EVO training session.

For TESOL entity sponsorship

If your TESOL or IATEFL entity has been asked to sponsor an EVO session, you should be willing to send an announcement of the session to your e-list and, if at all possible, to your newsletter and Web homepage. The EVO session you are asked to sponsor will be directly related to your membership's needs. In turn, sponsorship will attract new members to your IS or SIG and provide a forum that makes your name and purpose known to others. You may wish to ask your steering committee or other leaders to develop a session specific to your Academic Session or current issues in your field.

Please contact the current EVO Coordinator, Mbarek Akaddar, for more information or ideas to help organize your own session.

To see examples of the online sessions from earlier EVO sessions, go to

http://evosessions.pbwiki.com/EVO+Previous+Sessions

To contact the Coordinating Team, write to:

Mbarek Akaddar, Lead Coordinator

Dates to remember

Call for Moderators - late August-early September

Moderator training session - October-November

Call for Participants - early December

Registration  - early January

Please urge your colleagues to join this ongoing project!

  The Electronic Village Online is a project of TESOL's CALL Interest Section

Rev. 03 October 2014, E. Hanson-Smith)