As the Commonwealth of Learning (COL) was in the last year of its 2015-2021 strategic plan, COL sought to evaluate the impact of its interventions in open and innovative schooling (OIS) in the period 2018-2021 through an external review. An online quantitative study was carried out in Belize, Malawi, Mozambique, Trinidad and Tobago, and Zambia,…

The mid-term evaluation of the Partnership for ODFL in the Pacific Project was commissioned by the Commonwealth of Learning to examine the initial two years of the five-year activity. The evaluation was undertaken by Standard of Proof, the MFAT MERL panel, providing specialist services in monitoring, evaluation, measurement and research and…

This report evaluates blended learning implementation at the Uganda Management Institute (UMI), Uganda. The study assessed the effectiveness of blended learning (BL) for participants' learning performance and their perceptions about BL. The sample of this study included 7 faculty members and 31 participants who enrolled for 5 blended courses…

This is a research report on student learning and teacher pedagogical transformation at National University of Samoa after adoption of a technology-enabled learning framework and series of capacity building workshops. [This report was produced with the National University of Samoa.]

This report documents the baseline-endline study by the GIRLS Inspire team's Reaching the Unreached project to examine the implications of skills training and education for women's and girls' empowerment and sustainable livelihoods in Bangladesh, India and Pakistan. It is based on data collected from quarterly reports mirrored against the project…

A schoolnet program is an organized set of activities that expands the use of ICTs and promotes sharing of educational resources by teachers and students at schools. Schoolnet programmes may be located inside or outside government, may be large initiatives with substantial funding, or may be smaller innovative projects without big budgets. The…

Both of these "Surveys of policy and practice" were conducted on behalf of COL by the South African Institute for Distance Education (SAIDE) as part of COL's partnership agreement with the Association for the Development of Education in Africa (ADEA) Working Group on Distance Education and Open Learning. The first report identifies…

Assuring the quality of education provision is a fundamental aspect of gaining and maintaining credibility for programmes, institutions and national systems of higher education worldwide. Despite a long and generally successful track record, open and distance learning (ODL) is still required to prove that the quality of student learning is at…

Ideological arguments are made for open learning, economic ones for distance education. If it can produce similar results to those of conventional education at a lower cost, then distance education has a powerful appeal. With increasing demand for access to educational opportunities at all levels, and often decreasing budgets in real terms for…