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COL in South and Southeast Asia
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.
In South Asia, attaining most of the Millennium Development Goals and meeting the Dakar Education for All targets are major concerns. All five Commonwealth countries in the region confront limited resources of one kind or another. Four of the five do have well-developed facilities for distance higher education, which have expanded significantly over the last two decades.
There is, however, a need to transfer the knowledge, skills and capabilities developed in the higher education sector to other areas such as literacy, elementary and secondary education, teacher training and retraining, increased awareness and skills related to good governance at the community levels, as well as continuing professional education. Most of South Asia's poor are dependent on agriculture for their livelihoods, as well as their survival. As such, applying open and distance learning (ODL) and information and communications technology (ICT) expertise to development activities such as agriculture, food security and health is of crucial importance. The demand is so enormous that the region must use mass education and training strategies.
Serving the masses, however, does not mean compromising quality. COL programmes include bringing attention to, and facilitating the achievement of, international quality benchmarks. This region has all the potential to become a major global supplier of distance education expertise. Through COL, Indian expertise has been utilised in building distance education capacity in other parts of the region and the Commonwealth.
In Southeast Asia, Malaysia continues to develop its significant distance education capacity and offers its expertise to several countries in the Middle East.
EDUCATION
QUALITY ASSURANCE: A collection of quality assurance best practices across the Commonwealth, based on quality indicators for teacher education (QUITE), includes examples from Asia (India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka). QUITE, along with a module on Introduction to Quality Assurance and a package of Best Practice Cases, was published as a "toolkit" on Quality Assurance in Teacher Education and Development (QUATED) in late 2007. It will be used jointly with UNESCO for capacity building of policy makers and administrators in the school education sector. COL has joined hands with the Asian Development Bank-sponsored Distance Education Modernisation Project in Sri Lanka developing performance indicators for ODL-based higher education. The first COL-National Assessment and Accreditation Council (India) Joint International Forum on Quality Assurance in Teacher Education for Policy makers and senior administrators from Commonwealth Asia was held in Bangalore, India in December 2007.COL has also launched a Quality Assurance Micro-Site on its website.
TEACHER DEVELOPMENT: A unique bottom-up model of consortium building has been developed, targeting school and teacher development in South Asia (along with West Africa). Faculty and learner support personnel are being trained in India and Sri Lanka. A COL/Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU, India) partnership has launched a "scenario-based eLearning" (SBeL) programme to retrain IGNOU course developers and create exemplar training scenarios in professional education. SBeL was also used to develop an e-B.Ed. course that was launched in early 2008 for use by I-CONSENT consortium members. Also in India, COL is working with a collaborative network of 15 faculty and eLearning experts to develop an online version of a Green Teacher Diploma course in environmental education. The Indian course is also being adapted for use in Nigeria.
OPEN/ALTERNATIVE SCHOOLING - TO INCREASE ACCESS TO BASIC AND SECONDARY SCHOOLING: Open schooling is now growing rapidly, with India leading the way. COL is helping India's National Institute of Open Schooling to develop a training strategy for the 50,000 teacher-facilitators who support more than a quarter million learners in 3,000 study centres. A needs assessment and draft action plan for the establishment of an open school in Pakistan has been completed. COL commissioned and published a study on open schooling for secondary and higher secondary education in 2007. In its endeavours to develop and promote models which are sustainable, COL has identified Cost and Financing of Distance Education as a critical element in planning for sustainable Open Schools. In August 2007, twenty-five participants from eight countries attended a COL-sponsored workshop on the subject held in Gaborone, Botswana and, from there, developed an interactive learning resource which is available for use and further development on COL's WikiEducator.
www.wikieducator.org/Cost_and_Financing_in_Open_Schooling
www.col.org/OpenSchooling
HIGHER EDUCATION: Funded by Pakistan's Higher Education Commission, COL organised a study tour for 13 vice chancellors and rectors of universities in Pakistan to COL and various institutions in Western Canada which took place in May 2008. The collaborative Commonwealth Executive MBA/MPA programmes have attracted a cumulative enrolment of over 800 students studying through one or more of the founding partners: Allama Iqbal Open University (Pakistan), Bangladesh Open University, Indira Gandhi National Open University (India) and the Open University of Sri Lanka. The new Wawasan Open University in Malaysia joined the consortium in 2006 followed by universities in the Caribbean, the Pacific and West Africa in 2007.
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, which enrolled 29 students in Nigeria during 2007. ODL materials have been converted into "wiki" format through WikiEducator and three open educational resource (OER) example lessons for secondary education have been completed. There has been a substantial increase in the acceptance of open educational resources (OERs) concepts and approaches and expanded networks & partnerships in the Commonwealth and beyond. As part of a global initiative which aims to conduct 160 workshops, train 2500 teachers/educators and develop 2500 lessons of free content, Learning4Content aims to present two online workshops in each Commonwealth member state in the Asian region. WikiEducator averages over 3500 unique visits per day.
www.col.org/WikiEducator
LEARNING FOR LIVELIHOODS
LEARNING AND SKILLS FOR LIVELIHOODS: COL is working with the Adult Basic Education Society and the Allama Iqbal Open University in Pakistan, the Dhaka Ahsania Mission in Bangladesh, and the Kerala District Literacy Commission and Tamil Nadu Open University in India.
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 (L3Farmers), 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. Communities in Sri Lanka and the Pacific are now joining this movement that originated in India. COL's Poverty Reduction Outcomes through Education Innovations and Networks programme (COL-PROTEIN) awarded developmental funding to organisations in Bangladesh and Pakistan in 2007. In 2008, the Society for the Development of Rural Women and Children (SDRWC, India) received funding for establishing a Livelihood Resource Centre in the Prakasam District of Andhra, India.
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. COL and the International Crops Research Institute for Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT), Hyderabad organised a Think Tank to discuss the concept of Knowledge Infomediaries for scaling up L3 Farmers. A number of partners from Bangladesh, India and Sri Lanka expressed interest in building Knowledge Infomediaries in their constituencies. In Sri Lanka, hosted by the Distance Education Modernization Project (DEMP), Sri Lanka and COL, a group of partners from Bangladesh, India, Kenya, Papua New Guinea, Sri Lanka and Uganda worked on developing quality assurance systems for tertiary agriculture education.
TRANSNATIONAL PROGRAMMES: UN and international agencies such as the UNHCR, UNAIDS, WHO, the ILO, the World Bank, the Commonwealth Secretariat 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. COL has also started work for UNICEF India and UNICEF Bangladesh developing and delivering an effective communication eLearning course for all staff working in the two countries.
www.col.org/COLeIO
HUMAN ENVIRONMENT
GENDER AND DEVELOPMENT: COL is working with several partners to develop a Toolkit for Gender Friendly School indicators. These indicators are intended for primary and secondary schools and for use by School Management Committees, Parents, Students and Teachers.
HEALTH, WELFARE AND COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT: COL works with international and national partners to build the capacities of educational institutions, NGOs and community organisations to produce educational media content and develop non-formal open and distance learning programmes related to livelihoods, health and other aspects of community development. Since 2006, COL has helped to establish new media units in India and provided support for capacity building in Sri Lanka).
ENVIRONMENTAL EDUCATION: COL is working on expanding environmental education at all levels, creating awareness of the benefits and the 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 an excellent example of using ODL to scale up capacity for environmental education.
GOOD GOVERNANCE: COL is working with a number of partners to expand good governance through training for all levels of government and civil society. ODL training material is being developed, focussing on developing skills enabling informed, evidence-based and inclusive public decision making and on the processes by which policies are formulated and implemented. COL has partnered with Rupantar (a local NGO) and Action Aid in Bangladesh on separate governance initiatives in rural areas focussing on increasing the role of civil society. Rupantar is also training trainers in ODL. A model is also being developed for Women's Empowerment at the Local Level (WELL), based on existing best practices and using ODL to further opportunities for learning. Models will be piloted as Action Research initiatives in 2009.
www.col.org/governance
EDUCATIONAL USE OF MASS MEDIA AND ICTS: COL's work with media spans the full range of traditional media and new information and communication technologies, from FM radio to mobile phones. COL's programme includes special focuses on building the capacities of community radio and telecentres to be effective parts of the larger open and distance learning process and to work in concert with educational institutions and development organisations. COL also works actively with colleges and universities to improve their use of educational broadcasting, especially radio. There is also a new emphasis on exploring and demonstrating the educational applications of mobile technologies. Since 2006, COL has worked with educational and media partners in India and Maldives. Also, the Commonwealth Educational Media Centre for Asia is equipping and training several institutions and organisations, including a rural women's co-operative in Mysore, to operate community radio services.
VIRTUAL UNIVERSITY FOR SMALL STATES
OF THE COMMONWEALTH
Thirty small states (including Maldives in the Indian Ocean) are members of a collaborative network that is creating a new Virtual University for Small States of the Commonwealth (VUSSC). COL is facilitating this initiative, which includes ICT capacity building of professional educators and the establishment of a Transnational Qualifications Framework. Participants learn to collaborate using technologies such as BaseCamp (an online team project management system). VUSCC workshops (or "Boot camps") on the creation of open educational resources (OERs) have been held in various countries. The Government of Singapore has hosted and sponsored course development workshops for VUSSC contributors.
Where learning materials are created, these are shared free of charge via COL's website. These can be readily adapted to the specific context of each country and may be used in the offering of credit-bearing qualifications in the countries' postsecondary institutions. The focus so far is on skills-related courses in areas such as tourism, entrepreneurship, professional development, disaster management, fisheries management and a range of technical and vocational subjects. The VUSSC is throwing a wide bridge across the digital divide.
www.col.org/vussc
REGIONAL PRESENCE
COL's regional agency, the Commonwealth Education Media Centre for Asia (CEMCA), implements COL's mandate in the eight countries of Commonwealth Asia.
In the Education Sector, working with partnering institutions, CEMCA conducts capacity building and training workshops on development of educational multimedia materials, instructional design and eLearning for teachers and professionals in the open school and open university systems. CEMCA has recently developed "Easy Now", an innovative open-source based platform that allows teacher-developers to create multiple ODL deliverables from a single electronic source. This is already being implemented in India, Malaysia, Maldives and Sri Lanka. It is also facilitating the development of "Quality Assurance for Multimedia Learning Materials (QAMLM)" programme with partners in India and Malaysia.
CEMCA is also very actively and effectively engaged in the use of mass media for development, particularly community radio. Working with the Government of India, CEMCA is facilitating the development of community radio stations on campus and in the community, with civil society organisations, for use by disadvantaged and marginalised groups, particularly women.
CEMCA publishes a quarterly EduComm Asia, and produces knowledge resources on various applications of ICTs in education. Partnering with several regional and international donor agencies, CEMCA has produced various multimedia training packages including Community Based Rehabilitation for Children with Special Learning Needs; Gender and Rural Development, in collaboration with the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO Bangkok); Tsunami Teacher with UNESCO, Paris; and an Education For All resource kit for use by media professionals, with UNESCO and the Asia-Pacific Institute for Broadcasting Development (AIBD). CEMCA also serves as a regional networking and collaborating centre for open and distance learning and technology enabled learning services.
www.cemca.org
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
www.col.org/resources
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 advocates the use of the CC-BY-SA (share and share alike, with attribution) content license where appropriate and possible. COL is also 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 maintains a network of FOCAL POINTS which are nominated by Ministers of Education in each member country. COL's focal points facilitate dialogue between COL and country stakeholders as well as among the countries themselves, both regionally and Commonwealth-wide.
www.col.org/focalpoints
Several delegates from all five Asian Region countries, and two of the three Southeast Asian countries, participated in COL'S FIFTH PAN-COMMONWEALTH FORUM ON OPEN LEARNING (PCF5), held in London in July 2008, many of whom received sponsorship funds through COL. PCF5 included COL'S EXCELLENCE IN DISTANCE EDUCATION AWARDS, where Professor Anuwar Ali, President & Vice-Chancellor, Open University of Malaysia; Professor Uma Coomaraswamy, Emeritus Professor of Botany and a former Vice-Chancellor, Open University of Sri Lanka; Professor Abdul Khan, UNESCO Assistant Director-General for Communications & Information and former Vice-Chancellor, Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU, India); and Mr. Mahesh Chandra Pant, Chairman, National Institute of Open Schooling (India), were named Honorary Fellows of COL and the Open University of Sri Lanka's Faculty of Education was presented with a distance education materials award for its Master of Arts in Teacher Education. The next PCF will be held in late November 2010, in Kochi (Kerala, Cochin), in partnership with IGNOU.
www.col.org/pcf
www.col.org/edea/2008
OCTOBER 2008
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