Featuring the work of education experts from Australia, Canada, and South Africa, COL’s upcoming webinar showcases practical approaches to building and sustaining communities of learning and practice through innovative open education. 

Under the theme “sustaining communities of learning and practice in innovative open education”, this session highlights collaborative peer learning, mentor-supported OER development, and the creation, adaptation, and use of OER to support sustainable development. It also explores how open education can strengthen professional collaboration, expand access to learning, and support inclusive, practice-based innovation across education systems and communities. 

This webinar is the final installment of Beyond the Forum, a bi-monthly webinar series that continues conversations sparked at the Eleventh Pan-Commonwealth Forum on Open Learning.  

Date and registration  

• Monday, 29 June 2026, at 12 PM PDT (UTC-7)  
• Monday, 29 June 2026, at 9 PM SAST (UTC+2) 
• Tuesday, 30 June 2026, at 5 AM AEST (UTC+10)  

Register: https://commonwealthoflearning.info/4vHOJXe  

Speaker profiles and presentations 

Dr Philip Uys worked as a senior educational consultant in 19 developing countries; as full-time educational technology leader and practitioner for over 20 years in tertiary institutions in Australia, New Zealand, Botswana and South Africa; and Adjunct Associate Professor Education at University of Adelaide and Adjunct Professor of Online Digital Teaching and Learning, Western Pacific University, Papua New Guinea. Dr Uys’ work focuses on enabling educational innovation and quality and has been funded locally or by the EU, ADB, USAID, UNICEF, GIZ, the World Bank, and the Commonwealth of Learning. He holds a PhD in Education and Communication from Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, and has extensive academic teaching and research experience.  

• Presentation: Collaborative peer learning for international course development in the Empowering Women and Girls (EWG) project – Challenges and lessons learned 

Amanda Grey, MLIS, is an Open Education Consultant and Strategist at Kwantlen Polytechnic University in Canada, where she supports faculty in open education practices. She has been working in open education for over five years, with a focus on OER development, collaborative course design, and open pedagogy. For the NOTES project, she serves as an OER consultant with the Commonwealth of Learning, providing expertise in finding, evaluating, and creating open educational resources for teacher education. 

• Presentation: Building Sustainable Communities of Practice Through Mentor-Supported OER Development: An Iterative Approach in Pacific STEM Education 

Dr Nokulunga Sithabile Ndlovu is a Senior Lecturer in the Science and Technology Division within the School of Education at the University of the Witwatersrand. With 18 years of experience in teacher education, she teaches courses in instructional design, online teaching and learning, and the development of digital learning materials. Her work focuses on educational technology, open education, and teacher professional development. Dr Ndlovu is a member of the UNESCO OER Dynamic Coalition and the SADC OER Champions Network. As Principal Investigator of a Commonwealth of Learning-funded Open Educational Resources (OER) project involving teacher educators from Botswana, Nigeria, Rwanda, and South Africa, she led the incubation of the Network for Open Teacher Education in Sub-Saharan Africa (NOTES). She is currently engaged in building lecturers’ capacity to adopt, create, and integrate OER into teacher education programmes. 

• Presentation: Collaborative Approaches in Open Education: Leveraging OER Creation, Adaptation, and Use for Sustainable Development