What is the Commonwealth of Learning (COL)
The Commonwealth of Learning is an intergovernmental organisation created by Commonwealth Heads of Government to encourage the development and sharing of open learning/distance education knowledge, resources and technologies. COL is helping developing nations improve access to quality education and training.
Learning for development
The Commonwealth of Learning helps governments and institutions to expand the scope, scale and quality of learning by using new approaches. COL promotes policies and systems to make innovation sustainable and works with international partners to build models, create materials, enhance organisational capacity and nurture networks that facilitate learning in support of development goals.
COL helps developing Commonwealth countries to increase access to learning using distance education and appropriate technologies. Its work is grouped into three sectors of activity: education, learning for livelihoods and human environment.
Access to learning is the key to development.
Futher background
Headquartered in Vancouver, Canada, COL is the only official Commonwealth agency located outside Britain and is the world's only intergovernmental organisation solely concerned with the promotion and development of distance education and open learning. COL is helping to increase the capacities of developing nations to meet the demands for improved access to quality education and training.
In part due to the efforts of COL and its Commonwealth-wide network over the past ten years, distance education is now a part of the mainstream of education and training. It enables students to learn at the location, time and pace of their choice, for less money and with improved results. COL's goals include maximising the transfer of information, ideas, innovations and resources to support this rapid evolution of distance education.
Commonwealth Governments financially support COL on a voluntary basis. Major contributors have included Australia, Britain, British Columbia, Brunei, Canada, India, New Zealand and Nigeria.
Spokespersons:
Chairman of the Board: Lewis Perinbam
President and C.E.O.: Sir John Daniel
Vice President: Asha Kanwar
Media liaison: Dave Wilson (Communications Manager)
Three-Year Plan, 2006-2008
Learning for Development is the theme of COL's Three-year Plan for 2006-2009. It addresses a development agenda that includes the UN's Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), the goals of Education for All (Dakar), and Commonwealth's objectives of peace, democracy, equality and good governance. Increasing and improving human learning is the key to fulfilling most aspects of this development agenda. Conventional instructional approaches simply cannot expand quickly enough to meet the challenge. COL's role is to help countries use a range of appropriate and available approaches and technologies to foster learning at scale.
Sectors:
Education
Learning for Livelihoods
Human Environment
Outcomes:
Policies
Systems
Models and materials
Partnerships
The Commonwealth
The Commonwealth is a voluntary association of more than 50 independent sovereign states, which provide support to each other, and work together toward international goals. The Commonwealth is described as a "family" of nations, originally linked together in the British Empire, and now building on their common heritage in language, culture and education, which enables them to work together in an atmosphere of greater trust and understanding than generally prevails among nations.
Bringing together some 1.7 billion people of many faiths, races, languages, traditions and levels of economic development, the Commonwealth represents almost one-third of the world's population.
