Higher Education

Demand for higher education is outpacing campuses, budgets, facilities and staff. In a Commonwealth where more than 60% of people are under 30 (Commonwealth Secretariat, 2026), the scale and cost of building upon a conventional campus model no longer makes sense alone.

The challenge is not only about places in classrooms. Learners need qualifications that lead to work, entrepreneurship and further study. Employers need graduates who can solve problems, communicate, adapt and use digital tools, including AI, responsibly. Countries also need sovereign research and innovation capacity to work on home-grown solutions to national challenges and opportunities. Yet tertiary change remains slow, and often starts from an elite model poorly suited to a world of technology-empowered learners.

Innovation in higher education allows us to reimagine a flexible, quality-assured open ecosystem rather than a single pathway through one institution: online and blended provision as a new normal, open educational resources, open science and scholarship, recognition of prior learning, micro-credentials, and authentic assessment that shows what learners can do when technology and AI are in the room (Prinsloo et al., 2026).

Once the territory of open universities, digital is becoming the mainstream response to equity, affordability and relevance. For conventional universities, the opportunity is not to replace degrees, but to open them: stackable, gender-responsive and accessible to learners whose lives do not fit traditional structures.

The Open University of Kenya (OUK) illustrates the Commonwealth opportunity: a national open university that widens access while encouraging the whole system to modernise. COL supported policy development and implementation, learner support, course design, the practical systems needed for quality open education and the effective use of micro-credentials. For Kenya, this extends beyond one institution. Open universities can drive change across a country and region and act as innovation hubs for the sector, while conventional universities move to dual-mode delivery by drawing on shared open resources, authentic assessment and flexible learner support.

OUK is part of a wider pattern. Under COL’s 2021–2027 strategy, partners have developed 29 regional or national and 68 institutional policies and strategies for open learning, quality assurance and assessment. Recent support has reached national bodies in Eswatini, The Gambia, Ghana, Lesotho, Malawi, Mauritius and Sierra Leone, and institutions from Nigeria and Jamaica to Tonga, on open resources, learner support, AI policy, business models and online course design. Tonga National University adopted an institutional ODFL policy in July 2025, and the Open University of Ghana’s business model was approved in June 2026. In St Vincent and the Grenadines, the Community College adopted an online teaching and learning policy and developed 27 online courses with COL, with more than 80 educators trained in online assessment and learner support.

Over five years, more than 51,000 learners have enrolled in open and distance courses, and more than 6,800 staff have received capacity building.

Mauritius shows the system view. COL is supporting the National Higher Education Strategy 2025–2035, whose priorities include teaching and learning, digital transformation, research excellence, internationalisation and industry engagement, and has worked with the Higher Education Commission on national guidelines for the use of AI in higher education. Universities are also asking how to stay resilient: a survey of 60 Commonwealth universities on economic resilience, by the Association of Commonwealth Universities and COL, was debated at the Palace of Westminster, UK, in May 2026.

Being open is not enough: partnership needs to be bigger, and change must include pathways. Building on its multi-country Commonwealth Executive MBA/MPA (at the University of Guyana alone, more than 150 students have enrolled and 89 have graduated), COL proposes transdisciplinary Commonwealth Open Degrees, co-designed by partners and awarded by each under its own business model, starting with sustainable entrepreneurship, climate and the green and blue economy, and primary health care.

Each degree would share a common, micro-credential-ready and competence-aligned design (COL, 2025), so learners can move between partners, stack credit, and step on and off as their lives require.