The present report is the outcome of a study on the status of OER in the Commonwealth conducted in late 2021. Considering the importance of OER in the context of the challenges posed by COVID-19, the findings shall be useful for Member States and educational institutions to mainstream OER. The overall objective is to help countries across the…

Benchmarking is an important tool to compare and make deliberate progress in any field of human endeavour. For integration of technology for teaching and learning, this is relatively a new field. The Commonwealth of Learning (COL) promotes the use of technology-enabled learning (TEL) -- also referred to as "digital learning" -- for…

The climate crisis presents an unprecedented global challenge, which can also be an opportunity for Commonwealth ministers of education to demonstrate what science-driven, justice-centred, and civic-minded climate leadership can do to help put small island developing states and climate-vulnerable countries on a path to climate resilience and…

During 2019-21, the Ministry of General Education in Zambia piloted an open and innovative schooling (OIS) programme. It used an e-learning model that involved developing and sharing curriculum-based open educational resources (OER) to supplement other teaching and learning processes. The resources could be accessed through both online and offline…

"Open educational resources" (OER) are educational resources that are available to anyone free of cost and under an open licence to allow others to retain, reuse, revise, remix and redistribute them with few or no restrictions. In 2012, the World OER Congress saw the adoption of the Paris OER Declaration, which calls on governments…

Access to quality educational materials is a challenge in many parts of the world, including in some developed countries. The emergence of open educational resources (OER) is a landmark development in the history of education. OER support the notion of knowledge as a social product and education for all as a human right. The Commonwealth of…

This guide and tool has been designed to support higher education institutions to review, or audit, their readiness to offer blended learning courses. Users of the guide and tool will benchmark their institution's status with blended learning across a range of categories that includes policy, infrastructure, partnerships, learner support,…

The major objectives of this study were to review the current policy on and status of open and distance learning (ODL) and technology-enabled learning (TEL) in India; address the wider questions of access, equity and quality vis-à-vis ODL; analyse cost-effectiveness in relation to student success and attrition; and make recommendations for how ODL…

This study was conducted as part of the OER for Skills Development project of COL, supported by The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. The objective of the study was to collect baseline data from Commonwealth institutions with respect to the development, use and reuse of OER; the availability of support; and challenges faced in fostering the…

This report presents the findings of a baseline survey conducted at the Mahatma Gandhi Institute, Mauritius to strengthen implementation of technology-enabled learning (TEL). The majority teachers and students have access to smartphone. The campus has Wi-Fi, but there is need of higher bandwidth to support blended learning. There is limited…

This report presents the findings of a baseline study conducted at the University of Kabianga (UoK), Kenya. The study's aim was to establish the status of access to and use of information and communication technologies (ICT) for teaching and learning at UoK. The baseline study established that UoK's institutional preparedness status can be…

This brief to Ministers of Education provides examples of how governments and institutions made it possible for people to continue their education during the COVID-19 pandemic and identifies factors that contributed to success.

At any one time, about 300 million children of school going age are not in school. Experience indicates that when schooling is disrupted, whether by a pandemic, a natural disaster or other reasons, not all children return to the classroom. In addition, most countries have growing numbers of young people who have not completed schooling, or not…

The purpose of this report is to provide an overview of the present and future impact of digital learning on teacher education in Sub-Saharan Africa. The focus of the report is student-teachers and teachers, and its central argument is that existing institutional structures will be insufficient to meet the scale of demand for well-prepared,…

Copyright vests automatically in most countries around the world, whether or not the creator of an educational work wishes to exert copyright in its entirety. What this means for education, unfortunately, is that all traditionally produced, printed textbooks, are to a large extent "locked." Even digital resources such as those available on the…