- PEOI
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Professional Education Organization International (PEOI) Formation January 2000 Type public charity (501(c)(3)) Purpose/focus free post secondary education for all Headquarters Giboa, USA Region served worldwide Executive director Professor John Petroff, Ph.D. Website http://peoi.org Professional Education Organization International (PEOI) is an international organization which was created, and is run by volunteers who believe that it is time for open post secondary education be made available to all free of charge, and that the Internet is making this possible. It gives On-line course content to upgrade the skills of aspiring professionals, serving businesses that employ them, universities that award degrees, and faculty that offer instruction.
Contents
History
The idea of setting up a professional education web site grew out of the work of John Petroff, an American economics professor, in Russia and Kazakhstan for USAID (United States Agency for International Development) and the European Commission in the 1990s.
The creation of PEOI is a challenge to prove that professional education can be made available at little or not cost to all that need it. A study by the Sloan Foundation on the profitability of several distance education programs they supported, showed that on-line education is not a cash cow even when exorbitant tuition is charged. Undoubtedly, there are costs. They are of two types: development and delivery. Course development should be amortized over the life of the course which should be almost inifinite, but certainly not included in current operating expenses. Another conclusion of the Sloan Foundation study is that duplicating in class course delivery is as expensive as regular university tuition because of the involvement of instructors and the necessity to make available a range of student services. But that is not what on-line education ought to be because all students do not require an instructor, a library, a cafeteria and other such services. PEOI model is to parcel out and price separately the different services students may need: receiving advice from intructor, having new tests, submitting assignments for grade, taking test, receiving a certificate and having a permanent proof of course completion.
The major task resides in placing course content of quality. Rather than spend millions of dollars upfront, PEOI's choice is to subject a course to peer critique and comments. The ideal would be to make each course an open platform for all new refinements to be incorporated, in a similar manner to the medical advice web sites (such as Farminfo.com). Eventually, standards of quality in distance education will evolve. PEOI will be happy to take part in exploring and formulating such standards. The starting point of discussion should at least be a sample for all to see and discuss. And that is precisely what PEOI offers to the higher education community with its on-line courses open to all.
With this background, PEOI was started in January 2000 on the basis of 20 years of experience in computer based learning and teaching finance and economics courses. The obvious choice for the first course to be placed on the web was a course in financial analysis which was first distributed to students in the form of copied lecture notes when teaching at SUNY-Geneseo in the early 1980s, and which had gone through countless revisions and expansions after that. Although in need of revisions, four study guides that used to be distributed on diskettes, were added. Improvements in grammar and style are certainly desirable in much of the text, but getting the web site started will postpone them for a while. By the end of year 2000, the web site had been outfitted with all the needed testing and administrative features.
In early 2001, the functioning of the web site was thoroughly tested and a decision was made to create the organization itself. On March 5, 2001, PEOI was organized as Professional Education Organization International Fund, with abbreviation of PEOI, in the State of Pennsylvania (see Articles of Incorporation). In April 2001, an employer identification number, a bank account and a request for an IRS letter of determination as public charity got PEOI ready for its day to open for business. The English version of the web site was launched on September 1, 2001. On July 2, 2002, PEOI received its letter of advanced determination from the IRS making PEOI exempt under 501(c)(3). Much of the real challenge (described in Strategy) still lies ahead and achieving the impact PEOI should have for aspiring young people throughout the world rests in the hands of a few funding sources that recognize the importance of the project, and those of a few good men and women who choose to join in the effort to make PEOI a reality.
Available complete courses
- Fundamentals of Accounting I: Financial Accounting[1]
- This course is a review of the fundamental concepts of accounting. The focus is on financial statements that a firm prepares each year. How entries are recorded in accounts to capture all economic activity of the firm is explained. How accounts are organized and what transtactions are entered there, are studied. Year end entries and the accrual. method of accounting are described.
- Fundamentals of Accounting II: Management Accounting[2]
- This course is a review of concepts of how accounting is designed to help management make its most important financial decisions. It start by reviewing the principles that should guide accounting in order to serve the purpose for which accounting is designed. Accounting for different business forms is contrasted. Analytical approaches for decisions related to cost of production, volume and investment are introduced. The emphasis is on the ability of the accounting function to provide the needed information for the firm to remain profitable.
- Fundamentals of Economics I: Macroeconomics[3]
- This course is a review of fundamental concepts of macroeconomics. Together with Principles of Economics II, this represents the indispensable body of knowledge for anyone to undertake college education in general, and professional courses, in particular. The core of the course deals with fiscal policies applying to taxation and government spending, and monetary policy affecting investments and currency value. The emphasis is placed on periodic setbacks in economic prosperity and the choice of policy tools to deal with them. Major theoretical view points are contrasted. The first chapters offer basic definitions and general descriptions of economic processes and concepts. The last chapter touches upon economic growth.
- Fundamentals of Economics II: Microeconomics[4]
- This course is a review of major topics of microeconomics. It deals primarily with the behavior of participants in various types of markets. Goals, attitudes and actions of users and providers of resources are studied. Emphasis is placed on potential harm of certain strategies and on corrective government policies. The concepts of the course are extended to the international trade and finance context.
- This is an advanced professional course intended for individuals working in banks, investment companies, stock brokers or large corporate finance departments. There are three distinct parts: the first four chapters review approaches to valuation of financial assets; the next nine chapters cover one aspect of the firm operations and draw conclusions on the implications for the value of the firm to investors; the last two chapters incorporate economic forecasting to assessment of firm's strategy. There is a general theme repeated through all the chapters that there are many different purposes of analysis of a company's financial condition and the focus changes accordingly, but the methods remain essentially the same. All well known analytical methods are presented with examples showing their use, and with, just as importantly, a discussion of their limitations.
- Introduction to C Programming[6]
- This is an introductory course and covers the key features of the C language and its usage. The first five chapters help in thoroughly understanding the C syntax. The latter chapters focus on more complex concepts of the C language. This course will briefly touch upon some of the standard C library functions and the mechanism used in the implementation of the same. This course is based on industrial programming experience and extensive study of the language.
About 100 courses are in preparation and about 50 are proposed.
References
Footnotes
Notations
Categories:- Distance education institutions
- Educational organizations based in the United States
- Distance education in the United States
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