In Focus

COL’S NEW THREE-YEAR PLAN: BUILDING ON PREVIOUS SUCCESSES, GREATER FOCUS

The Commonwealth of Learning presented its new Three-Year Plan for 2009-2012 to Commonwealth Ministers of Education and received their endorsement this month at the 17th triennial Conference (CCEM) in Kuala Lumpur. Through its new plan, COL remains committed to “Learning for Development” while narrowing the focus of its work to two programme sectors: Education and Livelihoods & Health. The result of extensive evaluation and collaboration with a wide range of stakeholders, the new plan maps out how COL will help governments respond to the global economic downturn while also addressing people’s needs to adjust to change by expanding opportunities for education, training and learning.

The theme of this plan, Learning for Development, which is the same theme as for 2006-2009, expresses a vision that reaches beyond formal education to embrace areas of learning that are vital for better health, greater prosperity and a safer environment. Understanding development as the process of increasing the freedoms that people can enjoy, COL pursues this vision operationally within the framework of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), the campaign for Education for All (EFA) and Commonwealth values.

As part of its monitoring and evaluation strategy and the planning process for its upcoming plan, COL commissioned an evaluation report that examined activities in its 2006-2009 Plan. Conducted by an external consultant, Dr. Patrick Spaven, who interviewed a large variety of stakeholders, the extensive report provides valuable insight into the effectiveness of COL’s various activities.

The 2009 Evaluation has measured COL’s achievements against the 15 corporate performance targets set in the 2006-2009 Plan. It found that eight of these targets had been exceeded; one was met and six were partially met.

Some of the conclusions of the Evaluation Report include:

• ODL is increasingly relevant to development, its potential contribution to extending the reach of formal education is well understood and it is needed more than ever.
• COL has shown that ODL can deliver benefits in less formal learning contexts, for example in farming. This may be COL’s greatest contribution to development in the last six years.
• COL is relevant to development because it has a unique combination of assets that enable it to perform a niche role close to governments and other important institutions, especially those of small states.
• Scale and sustainability are COL’s main challenges.

The Evaluation Report supported COL’s decision to focus on fewer sectors and initiatives. It emphasised the importance of assessing partner readiness and capacity for scale and sustainability when considering new work. The areas where COL most needs to re-appraise its work are national ODL policy promotion and ODL for non-farming livelihoods, according to the report.

A COLLABORATIVE APPROACH TO PLANNING

While building on the extensive pan-Commonwealth consultation conducted for the previous triennium, COL has refreshed its understanding of current development priorities through various formal and informal channels including:

• A Board retreat that determined COL’s future focus (June 2008),
• COL’s Pan-Commonwealth Forum on Open Learning (London, July 2008),
• Meetings of COL’s country Focal Points, and
• Input to COL’s website in response to posting of drafts of the Three-Year Plan.

Through the external evaluation, internal programme evaluations, and these consultations, COL refreshed its understanding of current development priorities and its role in responding to these priorities. Its first response is to tighten the focus. COL’s two programme sectors, Education and Livelihoods & Health, embrace just eight initiatives (instead of the current 15) that will help governments pursue the twin goals of expanding access to learning and using public funds cost-effectively.

The second response is to scale up its impact. Working with its country partners COL has developed powerful models for applying technology to learning for development. These models must now be applied at scale and extended to new countries.

EDUCATION

The Education sector will deal primarily but not exclusively with formal education institutions. There are four Education programme initiatives:

Open Schooling: Growing success in achieving universal primary education is creating a surge of demand for secondary schooling that many governments have not the resources to satisfy by building more schools. Open Schooling can deliver quality education cost-effectively at scale.

Teacher Education: Achieving the Millennium Development Goals and Education for All will require millions of new teachers and training for millions more unqualified teachers already in post. Teacher education institutions will not be able meet these demands without adopting the methods of ODL. COL will help them do this.

Higher Education: Many universities face burgeoning demand after a period of neglect and some countries are creating open universities. COL will facilitate the expansion of quality higher education and share programmes among institutions, including imaginative courseware to promote the Commonwealth agenda of Respect and Understanding.

Virtual University for Small States of the Commonwealth: Hundreds of teachers and officials have acquired advanced information and communication technology (ICT) skills through this network. It produces and shares eCourses in skills-related areas within a new Transnational Qualifications Framework and links them together in a common portal.

LIVELIHOODS & HEALTH

The Livelihoods & Health sector will work to promote non-formal education and training but this does not preclude the possibility of linkages with formal institutions, where appropriate. There are four programme initiatives in this sector:

Skills Development: COL assists with the development of policy for the use of ODL in skills development, and works with partners to design and deliver quality courses that are increasingly rich in ICT. Partnerships among institutions at different stages of development operate in a spirit of south-south cooperation.

Learning for Farming: Lifelong Learning for Farmers (L3F) is a successful grassroots model for increasing rural prosperity that uses ICT to link banks and universities to village communities to exploit new economic opportunities. It is now being implemented at scale by extending the use of knowledge info-mediaries.

Healthy Communities: COL’s Media Empowerment model has proven its effectiveness for bringing health messages to communities. It will now be scaled up by training health groups and communities to create and share learning materials and make effective use of community media.

Integrating eLearning: Countries are eager to raise levels of digital literacy and deploy eLearning in their education systems. To build capacity COL is training educators to develop eLearning materials, to conduct eTutoring, and to share materials as open educational resources through communities of practice.

The cross-cutting themes of gender, quality and appropriate technology are pervasive throughout the programme.
Each sector pursues its aims through five core strategies:

1. Partnerships: Fostering sustainable partnerships and networks in support of these aims
2. Models: Refining and sharing models for applying teaching and learning technologies to development challenges
3. Policies: Assisting countries and organisations to develop and implement policies that support technology-mediated learning
4. Capacity: Facilitating training and organisational development to increase the overall ability of partners to deploy learning systems and technologies effectively
5. Materials: Working with partners to co-create learning materials and make them widely available

These strategies focus on co-creating value with COL’s extensive network of partners and stimulating new developments. To be more present at the regional level COL has its own unit in India, the Commonwealth Educational Media Centre for Asia (CEMCA). In Africa, COL works with RETRIDOL (Research and Training Institute for Distance and Open Learning) in West Africa and SADC-CDE (Southern African Development Community Centre for Distance Education).

To adapt its programme to fit the unique needs of each country COL develops individual Country Action Plans after extensive consultations with Ministers, Focal Points and partner institutions. These are monitored and updated regularly. COL in the Commonwealth, a compendium of individual Country Reports, is published at the end of each triennium.

COL practices results-based management. This is summarised through a logic model that lays out the expected long- and intermediate-term results (impacts and outcomes) over the three-year period. Outputs and activities, and the inputs needed to achieve them, are set out annually in log frames that are integrated with the logic model and are specific to each initiative. The log frames are regularly updated and have more detailed performance indicators.

SNAPSHOT: COL’S THREE-YEAR PLAN 2009-2012

• Increased focus: two programme sectors (Education and Livelihoods & Health) instead of three; eight programme initiatives instead of 15.
• Scaling up programmes by working with country partners.
• Building on success through programmes such as the Virtual University for Small States of the Commonwealth (VUSSC), Lifelong Learning for Farmers and eLearning for International Organisations.
• Continued input from country Focal Points.
• Expanded partnerships with international agencies, non-governmental organisations and educational institutions.

COL’s Three-Year Plan 2009-2012 and related documents such as Dr. Spaven’s Evaluation Report and individual country reports are available online.

www.col.org/3yp
www.17ccem.com

SNAPSHOT: COL’S THREE-YEAR PLAN 2009-2012