Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM)
Perth, Australia: 24 - 30 October 2011 (www.chogm2011.org).
COL's report to CHOGM looked like this. The documentation is this wrap-around to a brochure on "COL and the Millennium Development Goals" which is available at www.col.org/MDG.
COL also provided Foreign Ministers with preliminary versions of the individual Country Reports for 2009-2012 that COL will be presenting to Commonwealth Education Ministers when they meet in Mauritius in August 2012.
October 26: Presentation to Foreign Ministers by Board Chair, the Honourable Burchell Whiteman, O.J. and President and C.E.O., Sir John Daniel.
October 26: Following the COL presentation to Foreign Ministers, Australian Foreign Minister, the Honourable Kevin Rudd, announced that Australia would be rejoining as a financial partner of COL. He also included this in his speech later in the evening.
Story ideas for media covering this event are provided in the PDF file available on the right.
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.
COL's Three-year Plan for 2009 – 2012 (Learning for Development) was endorsed by Commonwealth Ministers of Education when they met in Kuala Lumpur in June 2009 (17CCEM).
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:
Chair of the Board: The Hon. Burchell Whiteman, O.C.
President and C.E.O.: Sir John Daniel
Vice President: Professor Asha Kanwar
Media liaison: Dave Wilson (Communications Manager)
Asha Kanwar will succeed Sir John Daniel as President of the Commonwealth of Learning on 1 June 2012. News Release...
Three-Year Plan, 2009-2012
The theme of COL's Three-year Plan for 2009-2012, Learning for Development, expresses a vision that reaches beyond formal education to embrace areas of learning that are vital for better livelihoods, 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.
Programme Sectors and Initiatives:
Education
Open schooling
Teacher Education
Higher Education
Virtual University for the Small States of the Commonwealth
Livelihoods & Health
Skills development
Learning for farming
Healthy Communities
Integrating eLearning
Key Aims:
Increase the number of trained teachers
Open up access to secondary school to larger numbers of pupils
Assist in the development of teriary education
Support skills development to improve the livelihoods of communities
Strategies:
Partnerships
Models
Policies
Capacity
Materials
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.