Janet K. Poley
Hall of Fame Class of 2002
Janet Poley provides outstanding worldwide leadership to the field of adult education. She has served as President of the American Distance Education Consortium in Lincoln, Nebraska, developing collaborative distance education efforts with international impact since 1994. She is providing vision and developing new directions for cooperative efforts to deliver a variety of educational experiences via distance technologies. She has developed a virtual organization on every Nebraska state university/land grant campus and has determined ways information technology can be used to enhance learning. She serves as Professor for several Colleges at the University where she teaches courses in Mass Media, Government, and Distance Education.
Dr. Poley served as Director and Deputy Administrator for Communications, Information, and Technology for the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) from 1989 through 1994. While there, she created a mechanism for international/global networking, providing hundreds of academic courses, degree programs, short courses, workshops, continuing professional development, research seminars, on-line information resources, and informal education opportunities in the United States and internationally. She worked closely with the White House to establish the first U.S. Government Internet service.
She has impacted adult and continuing education efforts in many developing countries through her work with the USDA and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). In Tanzania, she established a very notable work, a model rural development training and extension system in the five highest production regions in the country.
Dr. Janet Poley has received many awards and honors including the Charles Wedemeyer Award for Outstanding Practitioner in Distance Education in 2000, the Secretary of Agriculture's Award for Diversity, the Extension Service Administrator's Award for Excellence in recognition of her ability to bring tested adult education practices to the work of the Federal Government. She was also the recipient of the Organization for Intra-Cultural Development (OICD) International Award of Excellence. For her leadership efforts in Tanzania and other related assignments she received the Excalibur Award from the U.S. Congress and a USAID award for cooperation.