LEARNING FOR DEVELOPMENT is the theme of the Commonwealth of Learning's Three-year Plan for 2006-2009. Conceiving of development as a process of increasing the freedoms that people can enjoy, the plan addresses an agenda that includes the UN's Millennium Development Goals, the goals of Education for All (Dakar), and the Commonwealth's objectives of peace, democracy, equality and good governance.

COL 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.

Being largely comprised of small island states, the Commonwealth Caribbean faces challenges similar to those in the South Pacific region. Most countries possess limited resources to sustain a large education and training infrastructure.

The Caribbean has a long tradition of delivering off-campus education via the facilities of the University of the West Indies. COL's intervention can principally be that of a facilitator, identifying opportunities to add quality and variety to the ways open and distance learning is delivered. COL will continue to demonstrate how open and distance learning and technology mediated learning (ODL) can be employed to develop capacity in local industries such as agriculture, fishing and tourism. COL will also strive to work with Caribbean countries to address the challenge of boys failing to complete secondary education.

 

Recent COL Initiatives/ Activities

 EDUCATION 

Quality assurance: A collection of quality assurance best practices across the Commonwealth, based on quality indicators for teacher education (QUITE), has been completed. QUITE, along with a module on Introduction to Quality Assurance and a package of Best Practice Cases, is being published as a "toolkit" on Quality Assurance in Teacher Education and Development (QUATED) which will be used jointly with UNESCO for capacity building of policy makers and administrators in the school education sector. COL has also launched a Quality Assurance Micro-Site on its website.

Teacher development: COL is working with institutions in the Caribbean on teacher development programmes. Learner support personnel in Trinidad & Tobago are being trained.

Open/alternative schooling - to increase access to basic and secondary schooling: COL has commissioned a study on open schooling for secondary and higher secondary education. COL supported the creation of a new National Open School in Trinidad & Tobago, launched in June 2007. COL has also been working with the Caribbean Examinations Council (CXC) to assist it in expanding its capacity to manage the development and maintenance of ODL materials that support their curricula.

Higher education: COL continues to work closely with the University of the West Indies and other tertiary institutions in the region. The University College of the Caribbean and the University of Guyana have recently joined the consortium of institutions that, under COL's brokerage, are offering the Commonwealth Executive Master of Business Administration and Public Administration programmes.  www.col.org/cemba  

eLearning for education sector development: COL continues to offer IGNOU's Master of Arts in Distance Education programme internationally through its Rajiv Gandhi Fellowship Scheme; nine educators in Jamaica recently earned a Post-Graduate Diploma in Distance Education through the Scheme. ODL materials have been converted into "wiki" format through WikiEducator and three open educational resource (OER) example lessons for secondary education have been completed. WikiEducator averages over 3500 unique visits per day.  www.col.org/WikiEducator

 

LEARNING FOR LIVELIHOODS 

Learning and skills for livelihoods: COL has a long-time relationship with the University of Technology, Jamaica (UTech). The Technical Teacher Training Programme developed by COL through regional collaboration was piloted as a Special Diploma by UTech to students in The Bahamas and St. Kitts & Nevis. The materials produced through the initiative are available free-of-charge to publicly funded institutions in the region and have been adapted for use in Africa.

Rural and peri-urban community development: "Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger" (Millennium Development Goal #1) guides the efforts of this initiative. One of COL's flagship programmes, Life Long Learning for Farmers, is developing ODL and ICT-based teaching and learning models for sustained improvement of livelihoods. It is extending to more rural and peri-urban communities, often by self-replication, helping them to develop a holistic poverty-reduction programme. COL is expanding this programme, which originated in India, into the Caribbean, starting in Jamaica. Key partners are the Caribbean Agricultural Research and Development Institute (CARDI), the Rural Agricultural Development Authority (RADA, Jamaica), The University of the West Indies (UWI) and Micro Enterprise Financing Limited.

National/international community development: COL is helping to build ODL capacity among strategic national and international agricultural education, extension, research, training and policy-making bodies with mandates and resources for education, training and research in the food, agriculture and vocational sectors. Key partners in the Caribbean include agricultural education, extension and research and development organisations at the national, regional and international levels including, RADA, the University of Guyana, Ministries of Agriculture, CARDI, the Commonwealth Youth Programme in the Caribbean, the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture, UWI, the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), and the Technical Centre for Agricultural and Rural Cooperation.

Transnational programmes: UN and international agencies such as the UNHCR, UNAIDS, WHO, the ILO, the World Bank and the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies are using COL's eLearning for International Organisations programme to provide customised communications and data management skills training for their headquarters staff and field-based workers located throughout the world.  www.col.org/COLeIO

 

HUMAN ENVIRONMENT

Gender and development: COL is encouraging the use of ODL and other technologies to foster the full participation of girls and women and, where appropriate, men and boys, to address unequal gender relations that prevent equitable development. COL has recently published a report on Boys' Underachievement (with the Commonwealth Secretariat) and another on Women's Literacy and Information and Communication Technologies (with the Commonwealth Educational Media Centre for Asia).

Health, welfare and community development: In collaboration with international organisations such as the World Health Organization (WHO), COL is equipping and training government agencies, NGOs and community groups to use video and audio technology for local production of educational materials related to health, welfare and community development. COL is co-ordinating its activity in the Caribbean with WHO's regional office, the Pan-American Health Organization (PAHO). In Barbados, COL is helping to promote health information through programmes offered by Comfort Assist, Reach-Out, Education (CARE) in collaboration with the Media Unit at the Ministry of Education. COL is also working with the Guyana Responsible Parenthood Association on HIV/AIDS prevention programmes.

Environmental education: COL is working on expanding environmental education at all levels, creating awareness of the benefits and feasibility of using ODL for environmental education and developing learning materials for sharing across the Commonwealth. The Green Teacher Diploma now in place in India is a good example of using ODL to scale up capacity for environmental education.

Good governance: Underpinning the MDGs and other development targets is the strengthening of democracy through good governance. A relatively new area for COL, the objective is to use open and distance learning methods to add value to international efforts to achieve good governance. COL is working with the Commonwealth Secretariat's Commonwealth Youth Programme (CYP) in the Caribbean to convert its Diploma in Youth Work course into an online programme.

Educational use of mass media and ICTs: COL's Media Empowerment programme (COLME) is centred on the use of radio, television, video and audio production. The programme's impact has been to empower local communities, organisations and institutions with appropriate skills and technology that allows stakeholders to address education, environment and agricultural issues with locally created training and information. Over the past decade, the programme has implemented and sustained field-based activities in over 25 countries in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean and the Pacific. In the Caribbean, COLME is working with agriculture and forestry extension workers in Dominica, Grenada, Jamaica, St. Kits & Nevis and Trinidad & Tobago to improve delivery systems by using new technologies such as low-cost video. COL is also working with Ministries of Education in Antigua & Barbuda, The Bahamas, Barbados, Dominica and St. Kitts & Nevis on developing media production capacity for both radio and television. In St. Lucia, COLME is working with Sir Arthur Lewis Community College assisting in the development of multimedia-based learning materials.

In the Caribbean, COLME is working with agriculture and forestry extension workers in Barbados, Dominica, Jamaica, St. Lucia and St. Kitts & Nevis to improve delivery systems by using new technologies such as low-cost video.

 

VIRTUAL UNIVERSITY FOR SMALL STATES OF THE COMMONWEALTH

Thirteen Caribbean states are members of a collaborative network of 30 small states that are creating a new Virtual University for Small States of the Commonwealth (VUSSC). COL is facilitating this initiative, which is based on collaboration among a consortium of existing educational providers. One of VUSCC's workshops (or "boot camps") on the creation of open educational resources (OERs) for Life Skills courses was held in Trinidad & Tobago.

VUSSC countries have chosen to focus on creating post-secondary, skills-related courses in areas such as tourism, entrepreneurship, professional development, disaster management and a range of technical and vocational subjects. These non-proprietary, electronically-held course materials, which can readily be adapted to the specific context of each country, are used in the offering of credit-bearing qualifications in the countries' postsecondary institutions, strengthening their educational capacity and outreach. The VUSSC is throwing a wide bridge across the digital divide.  www.col.org/vussc

 

INFORMATION EXCHANGE AND KNOWLEDGE RESOURCES

COL is co-operating with international experts and agencies to provide information on copyright so that institutions and Commonwealth Governments might take action to implement education-friendly legislation that makes access to learning content affordable for more people. Information on various kinds of copyright licenses is provided on COL's website.  www.col.org/copyright  

COL's web site, newsletter (Connections/EdTech News) and electronic publishing/knowledge resources programme has led to its recognition as one of the world's foremost sources of knowledge on open, distance and technology-mediated learning in developing countries. Most of COL's more recent publications are also available on a CD-ROM.  www.col.org   www.col.org/connections  

COL indexes large numbers of documents from quality-assessed sources on ODL and development on its freely available Knowledge Finder. The Knowledge Finder includes information on education and development.  www.col.org/kf  

COL is supporting the development and use of free and open source software and is a leader in advocating CC-BY-SA (share and share alike, with attribution) content licenses. COL is also helping to launch the Pacific Chapter of the FLOSS4Edu project and working with UNESCO in promoting the COL/UNESCO Computer Navigator's Certificate, to widen access to information and communications technologies (ICTs) skills training using free software.  www.col.org/WikiEducator   www.col.org/ccnc  

COL's fourth Pan-Commonwealth Forum on Open Learning (PCF4) was held from 30 October to 3 November 2006 in Ocho Rios, Jamaica. It was organised jointly by COL and the University of the West Indies' Distance Education Centre (UWIDEC), in co-operation with the Caribbean Association for Distance and Open Learning; the Jamaican Association for Distance and Open Learning; the Trinidad & Tobago Distance Learning Association; and the Office of Continuing Education and Distance Learning at the University of Technology, Jamaica. Through a COL programme funded by the Government of Canada, a young intern was placed at UWIDEC in 2006-07 to assist with PCF4 and other COL-related activities.  www.col.org/pcf  

November 2007