COL'S THIRD DECADE
Introduction
COL embarks on its third decade in a strong position. It is on track to achieve the $12 million budget target approved by Commonwealth Education Ministers for the end of the 2006-09 Triennium. Many more countries are contributing to the core budget, some with significantly increased sums, and extrabudgetary income is growing.
The oxymoron 'radical incrementalism', which is emerging as a guiding principle for international development in unpredictable times, fits COL well by combining a shared vision of the desired future and a pragmatic approach to achieving it. It also implies, more subtly, a blend of differentiated approaches and sustainable outcomes.
COL's 2006-09 Plan, developed after extensive consultation, is robust. Its simple theme, Learning for Development, encapsulates a mission that will guide COL through a turbulent decade. The Plan's outcomes (policy, systems, models and materials) are a pragmatic expression of its aims and an effective framework for COL's work. Grassroots interventions inspired by action research allow the steady refinement of models for using learning technology to foster development. The Bill Gates Foundation has identified COL as a 'thought leader' in rural development because we have internalised the habit of reflective practice. My own vision is that by continuing to emphasise creativity, innovation and partnerships, COL can further extend its thought leadership in the years ahead.
The decade to 2018 will see continuous change, as much in the goals of development as in the learning technologies that can help countries achieve them. What are the key trends?
Development: the changing context
COL combines three sets of goals and values to make operational its commitment to 'development': the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs); the Dakar Goals of Education for All (EFA); and the Commonwealth values of peace, democracy, equality and good governance. This remains our overall framework for action because 2015, the target date for most of the MDGs and EFA goals, is still seven years away. COL will focus on a subset of these goals.
Within this framework the detail is changing for better and for worse as a result of global trends and the efforts already invested in reaching the goals.
Development Trends
Five global development trends will affect COL.
First, the rise of India and China as global development players is changing the psychology of development assistance, especially as these countries gain influence in Africa where COL has its major focus. India's expanding international reach is welcome because of its commitment to the Commonwealth values of democracy, diversity and human rights. Consistent with its long tradition of fostering south-south cooperation, COL already facilitates the transfer of development technologies and approaches between India and Africa on several fronts and knows the context well.
The crisis of food security is a second trend. It has emerged suddenly but may take years to solve. The Economist notes that: 'Ideally, a big part of the supply response would come from the world's 450m smallholders in developing countries, people who farm just a few acres'. This is precisely COL's focus in its Lifelong Learning for Farmers (L3F) and Media Empowerment (COLME) programmes. Our challenge for the decade is to scale up the creation of the social learning capital that is the essential basis of these approaches. COL's discussions with the Gates Foundation focus on this.
The third trend, climate change, has climbed up the development agenda almost as fast food security. However, the alarmist media coverage of climate change makes it hard to see the (disappearing!) wood for the trees. COL has spent a year researching how it can best help to palliate the negative impacts of climate change and this will guide its interventions over the decade.
Trend four is the new emphasis on community and communities. This manifests itself in various ways. We now realise that both local democracy and community involvement in institutional governance are as important as national elections in furthering Commonwealth values. The creation of the panchayats in India is a good example. COL's emerging governance initiatives are focused on these sub-national levels.
Communities are increasingly linked with media. Some Commonwealth governments are now more relaxed about licensing community radio stations. At the same time, community media centres have proved effective in ensuring that people enjoy the right of access to ICTs. They are not a stopgap until individuals are connected from home, but vehicles for community engagement with media and links to broader global networks. COL will facilitate these developments through its first-rate in-house expertise in CEMCA and Vancouver.
COL will expand its use of international communities of practice as a vehicle for capacity building and empowerment, especially of women. Already the Virtual University for Small States of the Commonwealth has created a network of ICT-savvy officials and academics across the world and WikiEducator is generating a similar Diaspora. Other communities of practice that COL cultivates are: consortia of teacher educators in Asia and West Africa; the Pacific Association of Technical and Vocational Education and Training (PATVET); an emerging professional network for open schooling; and the leaders of COL's Media Empowerment projects for agricultural and health education. Such communities take time to nurture but make a valuable contribution to innovation and quality improvement as they become self-sustaining.
Finally partnerships, which are now a trend for all development agencies, have always been the lifeblood of COL. Its partnerships with UNESCO and the World Bank are taking on a new lease of life, it has a developing relationship with UNICEF and COL also maintains contact with networks having similar interests to the Commonwealth such as La Francophonie and the Ibero-American bodies.
Progress towards the Development Goals
Although huge efforts have been devoted to achieving the Millennium Development Goals since their formulation at the United Nations in 2000, the profile of progress is patchy. Food security seemed to be improving steadily until the current crisis erupted. Yet now, without decisive action, 100m people could rejoin the billion already living on $1 a day. COL can contribute an important element of the solution if it can scale up the success of the L3F initiative. The poorest countries of the Commonwealth will be COL's special focus in the decade ahead.
Although many countries will still not see all their children completing primary school by 2015, the great progress being made towards Universal Primary Education (UPE) means that huge numbers of parents and youngsters are now seeking secondary schooling. In countries struggling to achieve UPE most will not find it. Part of the answer is open schooling, where COL is reinforcing its status as a thought leader.
Providing livelihood-related training to young and restless people (sometimes more pejoratively called 'youth at risk') is a critical element of the EFA agenda for Ministers of Education who seek a new balance between skills and academic subjects in their curricula. Media and ICTs can provide links to the cultural industries that are highly motivating for many young people. COL's work with partners in support of TVET, which involves training teachers at scale and using ICTs and media to impart a variety of skills to young people directly, will continue to gain momentum.
Key to the achievement of all the educational development goals is the training and retraining of millions of teachers. COL will make its world-class expertise in this area available to Member States and partners throughout the decade. A partnership with UNICEF holds great promise.
The Evolution of Educational Technologies
Process and Organisation
COL interprets technology broadly, placing as much emphasis on new approaches as on novel devices. Just as the principles of specialisation and division of labour were as important to the industrial revolution as the steam engine, so the effective use of learning technologies depends more on effective organisation than on the choice of equipment. The creators of UK Open University affirmed that developing courses in teams was more important to its success than the learning media it deployed.
Today countries are still creating open universities and there is a new focus on developing open schools. At the tertiary level countries and institutions are grappling with the trickier challenge of blending distance learning with classroom teaching - the so-called dual-mode approach. COL will continue for many years to help reduce the high failure rates of dual-mode initiatives by helping institutions in a spirit of reflective practice and quality assurance.
A new challenge for COL will be to help the small states to develop hybrid, multi-purpose tertiary institutions that can cater for the diverse needs of college age students and lifelong learners in a cost-effective way for tiny populations. This will require the intelligent use of a range of technologies, some of which are already being provided by the Virtual University for Small States of the Commonwealth.
Trends in Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs)
A number of ICT developments will create the context in which COL helps countries to expand technology-mediated learning.
First, connectivity is expanding briskly. However, digital divides - both between and within countries - will be here for years to come. COL cannot wait for them to be bridged, so it is vital to cultivate the skills for eLearning and online collaboration on the far side of these divides. The Virtual University for Small States of the Commonwealth (VUSSC) and WikiEducator are powerful assets for this work.
Second, the whole notion of online collaboration, which is the basis of both the VUSSC and WikiEducator, is made possible by Web2 technologies - a jargon term for the Web's evolution from a one-way display technology to an interactive environment. Millions now contribute to the Web through software for blogging, social networking and webcasting. Yet educational administrations have scarcely begun to react to this phenomenon - although in principle the interactive web should favour the now-fashionable constructivist approach to learning.
COL will stay at the leading edge of Web2 developments in order to help partners engage with them. In its own use of IT, COL increasingly uses services from specialist providers rather than maintaining servers. Its eLearning and course materials are already hosted on external servers and its search tools simply customise free services from Google and Yahoo. In ten years time, COL will likely treat IT services as a utility like electricity or water.
Third, Open Educational Resources (OERs) are a feature of online collaboration that is catching the imagination of institutions. COL has a long tradition of sharing course material (e.g. the Commonwealth Executive MBA and MPA programmes now offered in eight countries) and OERs represent a quantum leap in these possibilities. COL is well networked into the OER community of practice, with the VUSSC and WikiEducator being important development laboratories for the creation and use of OERs in the decade ahead.
Fourth, as bandwidth expands and compression techniques improves, ICTs and 'old' media like audio and video are merging into a seamless whole. This is good news for development because the old media are more accessible to ordinary people than traditional ICTs. As leaders in community media, quality assurance techniques for multi-media, and the conversion of materials between media (the EasyNow project), COL and CEMCA are well placed to help countries benefit from this trend.
There will be other developments over the decade. However, just as it would have been foolhardy - and impossible - to try to predict in 1998 the current ICT and media environment in detail, so trying to forecast the technologies that COL will be working with in 2018 is less important than being ready for them. The watchwords for COL must be expertise, flexibility and responsiveness.
Conclusion
Some development goals are being achieved but new challenges are appearing. Mass learning is one answer to these challenges and educational technologies, which are becoming more widespread and user-friendly, can help to provide it.
My vision is that countries will turn to COL as their preferred and most trusted partner whenever they see the opportunity to use learning technologies in the achievement of their development goals. Furthermore, through its emphasis on model building and reflective practice, COL will be viewed within the international development community as the thought leader in the application of learning technologies to development challenges.
Sir John Daniel
May 5, 2008
