Sir John Daniel, President and Chief Executive Officer
COL's Higher Education Specialist, Dr Willie Clarke-Okah, will retire at the end of 2010 and December 13 was his last day in the office. We shall miss him. A Nigerian whose first contact with Canada was working with the Canadian University Service Overseas in Nigeria, Willie later joined the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA), became a Canadian citizen and completed a PhD at McGill University.
Willie's work at COL was particularly important in two areas. He was responsible for managing the Commonwealth Executive MBA and MPA programmes, which began back in the 1990s as a collaborative effort of the open universities of South Asia (AIOU, Pakistan; BOU, Bangladesh; IGNOU, India; and OUSL, Sri Lanka). Today, however the CEMBA/CEMPA programmes reach into every corner of the Commonwealth as the consortium of institutions offering them has expanded to include the University College of the Caribbean, Jamaica; the University of Guyana; the University of Papua New Guinea; the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Ghana; and the National Open University of Nigeria (NOUN).
The challenge Willie faced was to get the consortium members to play an increasing role in maintaining and managing the programmes. In the early days COL was an essential catalyst in getting the institutions in South Asia to work together. However, COL is not an awarding body and now the participating universities, which make the awards, must take collective responsibility for updating the programme and supervising the regulations about how it may be offered. With the help of his programme coordinator, Lydia Meister, Willie achieved an important milestone in this process at the meetings of the CEMBA/CEMPA Executive and Academic Boards that were held at Wawasan Open University, Malaysia in May, 2010.
The other major aspect of his work at COL, which will be his lasting legacy, is the Review and Improvement Model, COL-RIM, which he developed for the use of institutions that seek to improve their quality assurance, particularly those that cannot call on a robust national quality assurance agency. COL-RIM grew out of COL's experience of two international review panels in Africa in 2007. I chaired a visitation panel to the University of Ghana and Willie organised a similar operation for the University of South Africa (UNISA). Both review reports were much appreciated by the institutions, but this model was far too expensive to roll out at scale for the benefit of the many institutions that want an external verification of their quality processes.
In response Willie developed, in a careful and systematic way, the COL-RIM model, which might be called a do-it-yourself approach to quality assurance with external verification. One institution has been through the process completely – and wants to do it again – while a list of others will be trying it in 2011. COL-RIM is an important contribution to the internationalisation of quality assurance and Willie's successor, Professor Madhulika Kaushik, who will join COL as our Higher Education Specialist early in 2011, will be facing rising demand for this quality assurance tool.