How can we assist the GIRL child to make her voice heard?
9 October 2020
Happy International Day of the Girl Child! The COVID-19 pandemic has rolled back the hard-fought gains made to gender equality and has deepened the existing gender disparities. Over the past few months, it has become evident that COVID-19 affects ...
Futures approaches essential for teacher development in an era of crisis
5 October 2020
In what might go down as the year of the biggest educational disruption of all time, COL stands with all teachers for their leadership, resilience, and creative response to an unprecedented learning crisis. On this World Teachers' Day, we ...
Three key components of the new school classroom
20 August 2020
By Dr Tony Mays, COL Education Specialist: Open Schooling Children learn things naturally. With access to appropriate resources, they can develop sophisticated understandings and competences. However, without careful scaffolding and support, they ...
Where is the Quality Assurance? Sustaining Online and Blended Learning in the post-COVID-19 Context in Africa – and Beyond
9 June 2020
  Introduction Amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, university campuses across Africa have been urged to shift their teaching and learning online to stem the disruption to learners caused by nationwide lockdowns of institutions. As ...
Education in the post-COVID-19 era
20 May 2020
The COVID-19 pandemic has affected every aspect of human endeavour and none more so than education. At the height of the crisis, over 1.725 billion learners were not receiving any education worldwide. As many countries attempt to come out of the ...
Beyond COVID-19: employing open, distance and e-learning methods to open schooling for all
3 April 2020
On 19 March 2020, The Economist carried an article titled “Mid-term Break: How COVID-19 is interrupting children’s education.” The first part of the title resonates with Seamus Heaney’s poem Mid-Term Break which seems sadly apposite at this time ...
Investing in innovations to realise women’s rights
5 March 2020
The theme of this year’s International Women’s Day is I am Generation Equality: Realising Women’s Rights. This year also marks the 25th anniversary of the 4th World Conference on Women, which set an agenda for women’s empowerment. While we can ...
Understanding Open Education
27 February 2020
In an article published in Distance Education in 2017, I argued against conflating open educational resources (OER) with open education. In fact, since then there has been a growing tendency to use the term “open education” while discussing OER. ...
Importance of TikTok Type Videos for Learning
23 January 2020
Have you heard of TikTok? If not, let me introduce you to this new kid on the social media block that uses 15-second videos. It is currently one of the fastest growing apps with over 1 billion users, and 800 million active monthly users. It was ...
Top 5 Critical Dimensions of Learner Support
14 January 2020
In recent years, open, distance and e-learning (ODeL) approaches have been mainstreamed with growing demand from non-traditional students, who are seeking more flexible ways to engage in lifelong learning opportunities. However, while ODeL ...