President's Message

Welcome to our website!

I’d like to take this opportunity to welcome you to the Canadian Association for University Continuing Education (CAUCE). As an association, we work to support Canadian continuing education units in a variety of manners to succeed in meeting their goals and mandates of delivering quality programs to non-traditional learners from different walks of life.

CAUCE has recently been working on understanding its member organizations and their needs via a series of surveys and data-gathering exercises. When I look at the results of these surveys, I am struck by the diversity of our organizations, their students and their programs. Small units with only 1 or 2 permanent staff, large organizations with up to 100 permanent staff. Units that are fully base-funded, units that are fully cost-recovery, and everywhere in-between. 100% credit courses, 100% non-credit, somewhere in between. Different delivery modes. Professional courses, personal interest courses, ESL, contract training, transition programming, credit Masters degrees. However, what also strikes me from meeting the members of these units, hearing their conference presentations and looking at their websites, is that we actually are very similar in the most crucial aspect. We are all dedicated to delivering quality programs to our non-traditional students, students who are often outside the focus of the University, and who need our advocacy, support and programs to make a difference in their life, whether it be a personal difference, a professional difference, or as part of their adaptation to a new life in Canada.

CAUCE plays a key role in helping each of us and our organizations in our work to make those differences for our students. This role is summarized by CAUCE’s mission statement:

“CAUCE seeks to foster professionalism in program development, management and administration; to stimulate and disseminate creative ways to provide programs that continue to meet with the ever changing cultural and vocational needs of adults; and to help strengthen the position of its members within their institutional settings and in society at large.”

Our 58th Annual Conference this past June, with its theme of Sense and Sustainability (Enlightenment, Economics, Environment) is a key example of this support. The sessions we attended taught us about different programs from our sister organizations that we might adapt for our students; about how we might work within our institutions to built partnerships, add value and advocate for our students; about who our students are and how to engage them; how to built a better service unit for our universities; how to weave sustainability into our programs and our daily work lives, and much more. Our annual conference is a great professional development opportunity for any of us. In addition, over the next year it is my hope that we can help with your professional development by the expanded use of our webinars, by your use of our Member Forum, and by the creation of a successful CE 101 course to help our new members to understand continuing education.

As Past-President Maureen McDonald has noted, CAUCE can play a key role in advocacy for our students, our organizations, both as a national advocate in the country as a whole, and by helping all of us to understand how to be an advocate inside our University. In many ways, I think that being an advocate for our students and our programs is the most important role that we have as continuing education professionals. I don’t know how many times a week I have to explain just what it is we do in Continuing Education, who our students are, and why they deserve to be at a University. I constantly draw on what I have learned from the work of CAUCE to help me tell those stories. This work includes the fine research done in CAUCE-supported research projects, as well as the excellent work published in the Canadian Journal of University Continuing Education (www.cjuce.ca). In addition, CAUCE is working with AUCC to build a better data base on who we are and what we are achieving, and get that data and those achievements before policy-makers and our own internal decision-makers. Finally, our 2012 CAUCE Conference in Saskatoon has Leadership and Advocacy in Continuing Education as its theme – see the Call for Submissions and other conference details at the conference website and plan to attend!

CAUCE is a strong organization, in good shape financially and administratively, with a strong and balanced executive, excellent committee structures, and experienced and competent support from the CAUCE Secretariat at the University of Saskatchewan. I look forward over the next year to working with everyone to enhance our professional development opportunities, to support CE units in their external and internal advocacy roles, to expand our research work, and to enhance good relationships with our sister organizations such as CNIE, ACHE, UPCEA and others.

Harvey King, President 2011-2012