COL Blog

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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. ...

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 ...

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 ...

COL has welcomed the recent adoption by UNESCO of the Recommendation on Open Educational Resources (OER). While celebrating this important milestone towards building open and inclusive knowledge societies, a look back is in order at COL’s own ...

Jane Constance with Alana Laudone (Benetech) In a world where 95% of published materials cannot be read by persons with disabilities and where 89% of vision-impaired people live in low- and middle-income countries, COL is committed to leveraging ...

The theme for this year’s World Teachers’ Day was “Young Teachers: The Future of the Profession”. We congratulate all the young teachers around the world for their service to humanity and their communities. The questions we must ask are: Are we ...

This year’s theme for the World Teacher’s Day, ‘The right to education means the right to a qualified teacher,’ reflects the growing international concern about the educational outcomes of school systems in many countries, and is emphatic of ...