Events  

At WEM ''Governments Advising Governments'' session, left to right: Mr. Manfred Shueller, Deputy Head of Division, Federal Ministry of Education and Research, Germany; Gajaraj Dhanarajan; and Ms. Ingeborg Boe, Executive Director, Representative Consultative Body for the Ministry of Education, Norway, and Executive Director, Norwegian Association for Distance Education. In Norway, the Government's commitment to education extends to legislation that encourages employees to take up to three years' leave to pursue lifelong learning and requires their employers to guarantee their jobs back upon their return.

COL at WEM

The third World Education Market (WEM) was held in Lisbon, Portugal, this year (21 - 24 May). COL partnered with WEM organisers to host three invitational presentation/round-table sessions for senior policy makers. The "Governments Advising Governments" series featured sessions on "Transforming Education", "Involving the Private Sector" and "Reconfiguring Education Financing". COL's President and Chief Executive Officer, Professor Gajaraj Dhanarajan, served as moderator for two of the sessions.  www.wemex.com

At the Board's strategic planning session, back (l to r): Dr. Walter Uegama, Senior Consultant, COL; Mr. Brian Long, Vice President, COL; Ms. Shona Butterfield, New Zealand; Sir Keith Hunte, Barbados; Dr. H. Ian Macdonald, Chairman, COL Board of Governors. Front (l to r): Professor Michael Omolewa, Nigeria; Professor Dato' Dr. Sharifah Hapsah Shahabudin, Malaysia; Professor Gajaraj Dhanarajan, President, COL; Ms. Helena Fehr, Governance and Programme Officer, COL.

Strategic planning for COL

COL's Board of Governors has invited four eminent Commonwealth educators to a strategic visioning exercise as a follow-up to the publication of the document Reflections on Ten Years of The Commonwealth of Learning, a report by COL's President. The group includes two COL Board Members, Ms. Shona Butterfield, Chief Executive of The Open Polytechnic of New Zealand, and Professor Michael Omolewa, Ambassador/Permanent Delegate for Nigeria to UNESCO, as well as two non-Board members, Sir Keith Hunte, Principal, Cave Hill Campus, University of the West Indies, Barbados and Professor Dato' Dr. Sharifah Hapsah Shahabudin, Deputy Director, Quality Assurance Division, Department of Higher Education, Ministry of Education, Malaysia. The Chairman of COL's Board, Dr. H. Ian Macdonald and senior COL staff will also participate.

The group's task is to consider the future directions of education and open and distance learning and how The Commonwealth of Learning can continue to make contributions by supporting Commonwealth member states. Although the visioning timeframe is ten years, participants will also help COL consider its new Three-year Plan (2003 - 2006) as well as how it might incorporate elements, such as the proposed establishment of a commonwealth virtual university for small states, into its current mandate. The need to ensure the agency has a clear strategic vision becomes ever more critical as COL strives to incorporate issues from the Millennium Development Agenda and other global agendas, such as Education for All, into its long-term planning.

Gender barriers to ICT

COL and its network are continuing work in addressing gender barriers, such as those encountered by women, to the use of information and communications technologies (ICTs) for education and training, and especially for open and distance learning.

An invitational meeting for regional representatives from the developing parts of the Commonwealth is being organised to take place in Ottawa from 24 - 26 June 2002 in partnership with Canada's International Development Research Centre (IDRC). Participants will review a report that summarises the outcomes from four regional meetings held earlier to examine the issues. The final report from this consultation will form the basis for the main theme of a conference on "Gender Issues and the Digital Divide" that COL and IDRC will be hosting in Ottawa in September 2003.

Global "digital divide" discussions have identified the particular need to address the implications of the ICT revolution for women, recognising the importance of taking measures to ensure that they are not deprived of the opportunity to participate in the emerging economy that is likely to shape the 21st century. 

COL attends DOT Force meeting

COL was invited to a meeting of the Digital Opportunity Task Force (DOT Force) in Calgary, Canada, in early May. Participants reviewed the progress of initiatives developed during the past two years, by nine teams, that will be presented to the governments of the G-8 countries at their upcoming meeting in June in Kananaskis, near Calgary.

The teams ( www.dotforce.org/teams) have worked on identified information and communications technologies-related (ICT) goals to:

• support development of national e-strategies;

• improve connectivity, increase access, and lower costs;

• enhance human capacity development, knowledge creation and sharing;

• foster enterprise, jobs and entrepreneurship;

• establish universal participation in global ICT governance;

• dedicate "least developed countries" initiatives for ICT inclusion;

• encourage ICT for health care and support against disease;

• support local content and applications development; and

• prioritise the contribution of ICTs in "overseas development agency" programmes.

The DOT Force is seeking collaborative partnerships among governments, development agencies and the private sector to fully implement the proposed initiatives, which are all aimed at using ICTs to assist development and reduce poverty in accordance with the internationally agreed-upon Millennium Development Goals (between 1990 and 2015) to:

• halve extreme poverty and hunger;

• achieve universal primary education;

• promote gender equality;

•   reduce under-five mortality by two-thirds;

• reduce maternal mortality by three-quarters;

•   reverse the spread of HIV/AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis (TB);

• ensure environmental sustainability; and

• develop a global partnership for development, with targets for aid, trade and debt relief.

The DOT Force was established by the G-8 countries at their Genoa summit in 2000 and subsequently met in Japan, South Africa and Italy, before this most-recent meeting in Calgary. Much of the international teamwork has been through e-mail and teleconference. Representatives of country governments, non-governmental organisations and the private sector chaired the various teams. The DOT Force has also aligned itself with development initiatives such as the New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD) in areas such as developing national e-strategies, developing entrepreneurship and improving access to the Internet and connectivity. 

COL will collaborate with those teams whose work can benefit from the development of open and distance learning strategies in support of the Millennium Development Goals.  www.dotforce.org

Course development workshop in Mokhotlong An adventure in the snow! Early in 2001, the Lesotho Ministry of Education contracted with COL to assist in the design and development of self-learning materials and the conceptualisation of a learner support system to enable the National Teacher Training College (NTTC) to launch its Distance Teacher Education Programme (DTEP) in January 2002. The introduction in 2001 of universal free primary education in Lesotho had created an urgent need for access to in-service teacher training which far outstripped the capacity of the existing face-to-face programmes. Under the terms of its agreement with the Ministry of Education, COL appointed a full-time (eight months) Technical Adviser, as well as a number of other international consultants to help to expedite the work. These included instructional designers, editors and learner support systems experts who spent periods of time in Lesotho to complete their assignments. The course development process was designed around a series of course writing workshops of two-week's duration. To enable the participants to focus exclusively on the task in hand, they took place in facilities in remote locations. The first workshop took place in September 2001 in the mountains at Mokhotlong....   Santosh Panda consulting with Agriculture course authors, Mrs. Qhobela and Mrs. Khitsane THE TASK WAS ENORMOUS, here we were in the remote Lesotho mountains, with an almost impossible brief: to prepare 18 distance learning modules across a range of subject areas for the first presentation of Lesotho's Distance Teacher Education Programme to perhaps as many as 500 students (teachers) in the following January. It was already September and we needed to have draft materials ready by October with final manuscripts available in December for printing. And at this stage the curriculum was not yet approved, we had willing but novice writers and very limited facilities and extreme weather conditions! So what did we achieve and how? Participants at the workshop included about 35 academic staff members from the National Teacher Training College, three typists, Professor Peter Kinyanjui (the Technical Adviser), Professor Santosh K. Panda (Staff Training and Research Institute of Distance Education, Indira Gandhi National Open University), two local instructional designers and myself. The equipment and resources amounted to two PCs and a laptop with uncertain electrical supply - so often they were not operational - pens and paper and whatever books and journal articles staff had been able to bring with them. In most cases these were very limited and old. However, armed with lots of experience and resource materials from COL and other organisations, we achieved an amazing amount under duress caused by unexpected weather. Keeping warm with blankets at informal evening function, left to right: Peter Kinyanjui, Santosh Panda, Mrs. Mokhethi, Professor Braimoh and Professor Bwatwa We were very much in the mountains! Mokhotlong is at the top of the Drakensberg Ridge which includes Southern Africa's highest mountain, Thabana Ntlenyana, at 3482 metres (Mokhotlong means "Place of the Bald Ibis".) The workshop location is eight hours drive by coach from Maseru, and Spring was just beginning ... but then Winter came back! If things weren't bad enough with very limited telecommunications and no chance of a mobile phone network, we awoke to about five inches of snow! This completely wiped out any road or phone access; the roads were completely unusable by any means other than possibly a four-wheel drive truck. Once the novelty of all this white stuff and wearing two or more blankets and many layers of clothes had worn off, then the anxiety started to set in. The end of the week arrived and things were still not looking good, everyone was getting more and more anxious about returning to their families and, with such limited communications, tensions were running very high. It could be weeks... But help was at hand - the Lesotho Defence Force was despatched to rescue us! Saturday morning we were to be at the landing strip, such as it was, and a plane would arrive...which it duly did, after a rather cold wait, and then to much relief, jubilation, singing and dancing. Strapped into fold down seats, military style, we hardly had the comforts of modern day flying but we were just pleased to be on our way. This was pretty scary, and a real experience for some who hadn't flown before. We took off over the mountains and had a surprisingly easy but very dramatic journey back to civilisation - or at least the military airfield outside Maseru! And it was warm, what a relief, and our mobile phones worked again! Rescued by the Lesotho Defence Force And during those days in the snow, the curriculum information was completed for Senate approval; module objectives and outlines, unit breakdown and objectives and in many cases first and even second drafts of some units were prepared. Guidelines for Authors detailed the plan and design of the materials, and we even managed to get as far as a Style Guide. The authors did brilliantly to be so creative and productive with all the problems of getting their materials typed up, the day-in-day-out nature of this type of writing, the extreme physical conditions and with many suffering from ill health. But despite all this, they were a delight to work with, worked hard and responded well to help with developing distance learning materials and instructional design. - CHRISTINE SWALES The DTEP was launched in Lesotho as planned in January 2002 with about 500 students (in-service teachers) enrolled. On the occasion of the launch, The Honourable A. Lesao Lehohla, Minister of Education, expressed his "high appreciation and gratitude to our development partners, particularly The Commonwealth of Learning for providing expert guidance and counselling for the programme development." COL has now been asked by the Ministry of Education, Lesotho, to continue to provide consultative services in establishing learner support, quality assurance, monitoring, evaluation and human resource development systems and in developing courses and materials for the second year of the programme.