Using Technology to Educate the Commonwealth about the Commonwealth

 

Association for Commonwealth Studies

Conference 20-23 May 2007 - Windsor, UK

Educating the Commonwealth about the Commonwealth

Using Technology to Educate the Commonwealth about the Commonwealth

Sir John Daniel
Commonwealth of Learning

 

Introduction

It is a pleasure to be at Cumberland Lodge again for another conference of the Association for Commonwealth Studies. Today it is my privilege both to chair this session and also to speak at it.

I shall talk about two related topics and then hand over to my fellow Vancouverite Michael Griffin to take you much deeper into contemporary technology with his address on Harnessing Multi-Media and Virtual Reality. Michael is a Canadian working at Oxford University and I am delighted that he could join us.

My purpose is to inform you about two related developments. The first is the Virtual University for Small States of the Commonwealth, which is a collaborative venture of 28 of the Commonwealth's small states to produce collectively eLearning materials related to their economic development. The courses presently under preparation are on postsecondary, skills-related topics. They are of the Commonwealth but not about the Commonwealth.

However, the way that the materials are being developed, as open educational resources, or OERs, in a collaborative electronic space called WikiEducator, is directly relevant to educating the Commonwealth about the Commonwealth.

I shall argue that the best way to raise the profile of Commonwealth studies is to create a Commonwealth-wide community of teachers who contribute exciting learning materials to what you might call a WikiCommonwealth. Teachers seek to make their lessons interesting and telling. Helping them do that will be a more effective way of raising the profile of the Commonwealth in the classrooms of the Commonwealth than badgering ministers of education to make place for the Commonwealth in the curriculum.

The Virtual University for Small States of the Commonwealth

I start with the Virtual University for Small States of the Commonwealth. We all recall the dotcom frenzy of 1999-2000 but even I, who was in the thick of it, find it hard to remember just how extreme was the hype we heard that year. The world of education was invaded by Internet freaks who told us that henceforward all valid education would take place in front of a computer screen and that all previous educational methods were headed for the dustbin of history.

Looking back from today it all seems a bit silly but in 2000 that was the prevailing atmosphere when the Commonwealth Ministers of Education met in Halifax, Nova Scotia for their triennial meetings. How should they respond to the new online world?

This question was particularly acute for the small states. As scholars of the Commonwealth you all know that two thirds of the Commonwealth membership, some 33 countries, are defined as small states. These countries felt that they did not have the critical mass, either in infrastructure or in people, to participate successfully in the online world. As the ministers discussed the challenge, however, the idea emerged that although their countries might not be able to conquer the online world individually they could make progress if they worked together. They called the vehicle for this collaboration the Virtual University for Small States of the Commonwealth and asked the Commonwealth of Learning to develop a proposal for it.

COL did so, using a small group of ministers as a reference group, and brought it to the Ministers' next triennial meeting in Edinburgh, when it was approved. As we began to implement the proposal two things quickly became apparent. First, the panic of the dotcom frenzy had, thankfully, subsided.

We often tend to overestimate the impact of a new phenomenon in the short time whilst underestimating its impact in the long term. By 2004 the online world was still important but it was not an immediate matter of life and death. States could take their time to adjust to it in a systematic way.

The second development was the discovery that donor agencies had very little interest in funding the administrative infrastructure for a new international organisation, although they were interested in the developmental benefits that the Virtual University for Small States of the Commonwealth, which we call the VUSSC, might procure for individual member states. We therefore abandoned any idea of creating the VUSSC from the top down and began to develop it from the top down. We began by asking each of the small states' ministers of education three  questions:

- Are you still interested in participating in the VUSSC?
- If so, what do you hope to achieve through the VUSSC for your country?
- Do you see the VUSSC as entirely online, or using multiple media?

At that point just over twenty of the small states declared that they were still interested. The number has now grown to 28 as the project has gained momentum.

In response to the question about purpose the ministers responded with a list of topics that you could describe as postsecondary and skills related: teacher education; information and communication technology, information systems, tourism and hospitality, nursing and health care, technical and vocational education and training, life skills, management and public administration, agriculture and fisheries. Many ministers see this as a way of enriching and expanding the offerings of their tertiary colleges and, where they exist, their universities. This list does not include Commonwealth studies but, as I shall show, we are creating a vehicle that could readily be used for teaching about the Commonwealth.

To the question about media the ministers replied that although they understood that the limited ICT infrastructure of their countries meant that they would have to use a variety of media in delivering the courses, they want the VUSSC to bring their countries and their people into the online world as a primary objective. We are delivering on that objective. Indeed, as I shall explain, VUSSC participants have leapfrogged to the very latest ICT developments.

In 2000 the ministers' basic idea was that their countries should collaborate to expand the scope and scale of education. The vehicle that we have chosen for this collaboration is a Wiki.

You all know about Wikipedia, the world's largest encyclopaedia, which reflects the inputs of hundreds of thousands of people. I shall not talk about that, except to say that listening to Leo Conolly this morning I wondered whether we should aim next for the Wikipedia of Post-Colonial Literatures in English.

COL has created WikiEducator, which operates similarly but for educators. Many communities of educators outside the Commonwealth of Learning are already using it and in a moment I shall suggest that this is an ideal vehicle for increasing the scope and scale of Commonwealth Studies. But first, let me describe its use for the Virtual University for Small States of the Commonwealth.

A Wiki can be used for any collaborative venture in which various people contribute to a document or multi-media presentation. They contribute online and the Wiki software organises the contributions in a helpful way. The central server can be anywhere. I think WikiEducator is on a server in Germany but I'm not sure and it doesn't matter.

In theory, since people contribute online, each contributor to the VUSSC could simply begin by doing that online from their country. However, we believed it was vital to start the work on each topic by bringing people together in order to develop a common view of what the VUSSC is, to bring participants up to speed on the ICT skills required for the work, and to begin developing learning materials. We call this gathering, which lasts three weeks, a Boot Camp.

The first, for those countries that wanted to develop materials on hospitality and tourism, was held in Mauritius last August in the excellent facilities of the University of Mauritius. A second, on teacher education, was held in Singapore in April. A third, on life skills, will be held in Trinidad in August.

The boot camps and the collaborative development of materials are, of course, only a means of reaching the key goal, which is to deliver programmes and support to real learners in the participating countries. This requires the various partners to work together. COL's role is to coordinate the initiative and create the networks to initiate work on the different topic areas. We also share our expertise in learning technology and help build up the capacity to use these technologies in the individual countries.

But our role is a facilitating one. COL is not the Virtual University. COL is not an awarding body. This is a project of ministers of education and their ministries have an essential role in embedding the Virtual University for Small States of the Commonwealth in their countries' education systems through appropriate policies and resource allocation. Theirs is the task of seeing that the initiative is meeting national goals and that their institutions are thoroughly involved in it. The key aim of the VUSSC is to strengthen existing institutions, not to create a new one.

So institutions have a key role in adapting the collaboratively developed course material, integrating it into their course offerings and making awards. This poses a special challenge and COL is working with the South African Qualifications Authority to come up with a qualifications framework that suits a transnational operation like this one.

There is much more that I could say about the Virtual University for Small States of the Commonwealth but that gives you the general picture.

The programme is going well. We already have 90% of the Commonwealth's small states involved and that means most of their institutions. As the number of courses available though VUSSC collaboration increases we hope that they will be widely integrated into their regular programmes.

A final point, which leads me nicely into my final section on educating the Commonwealth about the Commonwealth is that the purpose of VUSSC collaboration is not to make the small states self sufficient in the production of open educational resources. They have always said that once they have mastered the technology and the know how - so that they can recognise a good OER when they see one - they will be very happy to use materials developed elsewhere. I hope that some such materials might be developed by the community of Commonwealth studies.

WikiCommonwealth

Other speakers at this conference, starting with Dr Donald Markwell, are providing splendid contributions on why and how we should study the Commonwealth and what we should study. My concern is how to increase access to learning about the Commonwealth in developing countries.

I am well aware of the campaign to get persuade ministers of education to include the study of the Commonwealth in their school curricula and I support it. I doubt that the campaign will be successful but it is important to continue making the case to keep the Commonwealth in ministers' minds. My doubts about the success of the campaign come from my time as Assistant Director-General of Education at UNESCO, when I attended many meetings of ministers of education and frequently heard people trying to persuade them to add this or that subject to their school curricula.

The ministers either replied with politically correct waffle or, if they were being honest, said that their school curricula were already overloaded and that the route to better quality education and deeper learning lay in reducing the curriculum rather than adding to it. For many ministers covering the curriculum has become the enemy of learning.

In my current capacity as president of COL I was present when the issue of the Commonwealth in the curriculum came up for discussion at the 16th Conference of Commonwealth Ministers of Education in Cape Town last December and the response was the same.

But this does not mean that the Commonwealth in the curriculum is a lost cause. The route to making it happen is the teachers. The key to getting the teachers to make it happen is to give them easy access to interesting and well designed material about the Commonwealth that they can use in their social studies and other classes.

I suggest that one good way of doing this is to create a WikiCommonwealth and foster its development. The virtue of the Wiki is that it allows teachers in developing countries not just to access teaching materials at low cost, but also to create them for use elsewhere. Ian Wilson reminded us this morning of the tremendous resources that are now available on the web for a teacher who wants to put together a lesson about any aspect of national or Commonwealth history. A teacher who wants to encourage structured learning in the land of informed bewilderment.

I shall not talk about the technical aspects of this except to say that the Commonwealth of Learning would be eager to work with any group of teachers who would like to get this going. I shall focus on the aspects of principle.

The first principle is that Wikis are a manifestation of the free content movement: a worldwide community that has the ambition to make an entire school curriculum freely available by 2015. The generic term is open educational resources or OERs.

The promoters of free content are motivated by the principle of free sharing of knowledge that we indeed take for granted in many areas.

The first key to the free sharing of knowledge is having the technology to make it happen. This is provided by steadily expanding connectivity and the free open source software of Wikis. The second is the have the right license. WikiEducator uses a Creative Commons license designed to give greater flexibility than standard copyright.

There are various restrictions that one can put on the Creative Commons license and WikiEducator uses the BY and SA restrictions. BY means that if you use the material you must acknowledge the source. SA stands for Share Alike, which means that if you adapt the material you find on WikiEducator your must, in turn, put your adaptation back into the system under the same license so that someone else can, with acknowledgement, adapt your version and so on.

This, of course, is the great strength of the Wiki in its application to Commonwealth Studies. Teachers around the Commonwealth are free to adapt the material they find; provided they put their version back into the system. In this way we would build up a rich set of teaching materials based on a common spine but adapted to the different realities of Commonwealth countries and regions. Moreover the common spine can start anywhere. This lends itself perfectly to south-south and south-north exchange.

There is already a growing corpus of material in the form of Open Educational Resources, although for some of it there are greater restrictions on use than for the material on WikiEducator.

Two institutions that have made a major contribution to the availability of OERs are MIT, which has put its instructors' lecture notes online, and, perhaps of more relevance to Commonwealth Studies, the Open University through its OpenLearn initiative.

During this morning's session on publishing I went into the OpenLearn website. So far the Open University's excellent courses on Post-Colonial Literatures in English are not on the site but no doubt they soon will be and this will be a wonderful way of opening them up to the developing world. The OpenLearn site was launched last October and already gets 20,000 visits each week.

Both of these are a tremendous contribution to the Open Educational Resources movement, although some of the material carries a more restrictive Creative Commons license that includes the NC, or Non-Commercial restriction.

COL recommends that those developing materials in Commonwealth Studies avoid the NC restriction and, in fact, this restriction cannot be applied to material on WikiEducator, which insists that material on it be completely free.

Conclusion

There is much that I have left unsaid but I hope I have alerted you to two important developments.

First, through collaboration on the latest open source ICT systems, the small states of the Commonwealth are leapfrogging developments elsewhere and manifesting the best collaborative traditions of the Commonwealth.

Second, the emergence of Open Educational Resources is creating a global intellectual commons that could be of immense value to the expansion of Commonwealth Studies if teachers can only seize the opportunity. COL stands ready to help them.

I thank you and it is a pleasure to thank my COL colleagues Paul West and Wayne Mackintosh for their important contribution to the thinking behind these remarks.