One of the key aspects of online volunteering is its inclusiveness. Because it does not involve any costs or travel, online volunteering enables anyone from anywhere in the world to share their skills for the benefit of peace and development. It offers opportunities for people with disabilities, who may not have the possibility to travel to another country, to volunteer their time, skills and expertise and to make a difference helping development organizations around the globe.

The Online Volunteering service is supporting a research project on ways to facilitate volunteering for peace and development for people with disabilities. A summary of the project will be featured in a future issue of the newsletter.

We know that a number of volunteers have chosen to indicate in their user profiles that they consider themselves to be people with disabilities. If you have collaborated with online volunteers who have disabilities, please send an email to info@onlinevolunteering.org and tell us about your collaboration. We look forward to hearing from you!

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2. TIP: How to select your online volunteers

Unlike the application process for UNV volunteers, online volunteers are not pre-screened by UNV. They register an account on the Online Volunteering service website and apply for the opportunities that your organization posts. Applying for an online volunteering opportunity is very much like applying for a job: anyone above the age of 18 who believes he/she has the skills and interest to support your organization with the task outlined in the opportunity can submit an application. This gives everyone a chance to participate, and gives you the freedom of choice to find volunteers with the kind of profile you are looking for. We offer a few tips to guide you through the volunteer selection process:

What are the steps to follow in order to accept a candidate?
Access the Manage Volunteers page of your account to review the applications. It can be very useful to short-list a few candidates and send them some test questions. Once you have found the person with the profile that matches your needs, send him or her an email with more detailed information about the assignment and, together with the volunteer, define the deliverables, set up a schedule and agree on the process and next steps. Make sure to address all aspects of your collaboration, such as copyrights for design assignments, to avoid potential misunderstandings. When you have selected the volunteer(s) you want to involve in the task, remember to mark all other applicants as rejected by ticking the box in front of the applicants’ names and clicking the reject applications button at the bottom of the page.

How can I ensure that the selected candidates have the right skills?
The first and most important step is to provide a detailed description of your needs in the opportunity posted on the Online Volunteering service website. Qualified volunteers will tailor their application to your requirements and make it easier for you to judge whether or not they have the right skills to support you with the task. Asking volunteers to include a CV in their application can also be helpful. Sometimes the information volunteers provide in the application may not be enough for you to decide whether or not they are suitable candidates. You should not hesitate to contact the volunteers to probe further: ask them for more details or clarification, or ask them to submit short samples of their work (e.g. a short test translation or design samples, where relevant).

Why should I reject applications that have not been selected?
Volunteers who apply for an opportunity are enthusiastic and eager to support your organization’s work. It can be difficult to say no. There are two reasons why it is important to inform applicants who do not meet your requirements that they have not been selected for the assignment. First, rejecting applications will signal to the volunteers that their offers to help are taken seriously. Second, volunteers would rather receive a friendly and timely message to let them know that they have not been selected for the task than to wait for weeks without hearing back from you. This is demotivating and will prompt them to submit negative feedback on your volunteer management skills. The reject functionality with the automated message we offer on the Online Volunteering service website makes the rejection process quick and efficient.

What is UNV’s role in the volunteer selection process?
UNV offers a website to help you connect with volunteers, as well as tools and guidance to support your effective online selection and collaboration with them. UNV does not pre-screen online volunteers. It is your organization’s responsibility to screen applicants. Since online volunteers do not have a contract with UNV, they are not considered UNV volunteers but online volunteers for your organization. However, UNV monitors user satisfaction to make online volunteering an efficient and rewarding experience. It is therefore important that, in addition to providing feedback about your organization’s collaboration with online volunteers, you inform UNV in case you encounter any problems with applicants or volunteers.

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Professional Education Organization International (PEOI) delivers online university level courses free of charge to over 6,100 registered students from 196 countries. All activities are managed by around 3,800 online volunteers from 142 countries. PEOI's volunteers have created complete online university level textbooks, developed assignments, reading lists, cases or lab projects, class discussions, as well as review and test questions. Some courses contain additions from illustrators and/or audio specialists, and from IT specialists who devise stylesheets, write programming scripts, or debug php, html or xml code. A large number of translators work on making the courses available in PEOI's ten operating languages. PEOI currently has about a dozen courses completed, and a few hundred under construction.

PEOI’s founder John Petroff, a retired professor of finance and economics, asks volunteers to register on the PEOI website to access the course development tools. PEOI places great value on volunteer management and disseminates a monthly newsletter to keep its volunteers abreast of the latest developments, new volunteers, highlights and other issues of interest. Registration also facilitates group interaction and team spirit within each one of PEOI's disciplines, helping volunteers to exchange ideas on how to develop the courses in their respective disciplines.

“At each step, control of quality is imperative to make sure that the end product is truly a university level course. While it would be desirable that all PEOI's volunteers are university professors, it is also not realistic. There are plenty of tasks that graduate students can do such as translating, writing test questions or assignments. The result of this combined effort is something that PEOI's volunteers can really be proud of and that can make a difference in the lives of many students,” John Petroff says.

Minh Vo from Viet Nam holds a Doctor of Pharmacy degree and works as a researcher for a pharmaceutical company in the USA. She joined PEOI in 2006 and developed two online courses, ‘Pharmacokinetics – Concepts and Applications’ and ‘Clinical Pharmacokinetics’. She also acts as board member for the organization. “It was a great collaboration with much assistance and guidance from the director of PEOI. I also have a great team. Our virtual working relationship is not much different from a face-to-face relationship. There are no obstacles with online communication tools (e.g., email, discussion forum) to accomplish our goals.”

Punam Kumar from India completed her Master’s degree in Botany and is a mother and housewife. She has been volunteering for PEOI since 2007 and created the ‘Introduction to Botany’ course, an equivalent of more than 450 pages of textbook material and 187 images and drawings showing the inner features of plants, cells and processes. With the help of her son, she learned HTML code in order to design the tables, place style tags, and create lists and links to other pages. She was drawn to PEOI’s mission to support free and open education and enjoyed the learning experience of her assignment: “It enabled me to contribute and spread my knowledge from the confines of my household as well as helped expand my own knowledge base.”

Dennis Dantic, a Filipino expatriate living in the UK, has a Master of Public Health and works as team leader at a centre for people with mental health issues. Having joined PEOI in January 2010, Dennis volunteers an average of six hours per week to lead the development of the Public Health course, manage the recruitment process of online volunteers for the writing of public health courses and coordinate the development of two courses, ‘Foundations of Public Health’ and ‘Biostatistics’. “I wish that more people would become part of this innovative and exciting trend to help people using the power of technology and the Internet. This is a very rewarding endeavour. There are so many things to do, so many things to learn.”