Programmes

Programme Framework

COL's programme is guided by three strategic goals:

quality education for all Commonwealth citizens
human resource development in the Commonwealth
harnessing ODL and technologies to achieve development goals

In the light of wide consultations, during 2012-2015 COL will continue to work in two sectors — Education and Livelihoods & Health — but will focus on seven programme initiatives instead of the eight in the previous Three-Year Plan. The emphasis will be on:

skills development in both sectors,
the education and training of girls and women, and
the promotion of the use of open educational resources (OER).

The Education sector helps countries improve the scope, scale and quality of formal instruction at all levels through the use of learning technologies. This sector has four initiatives:

Open Schooling,
Teacher Education,
Higher Education, and
the Virtual University for Small States of the Commonwealth (VUSSC).

The Livelihoods & Health sector works in both formal and non-formal learning environments. It helps communities, civil society and institutions to improve the livelihoods and health of their members by using variouis technologies to enhance skills, share knowledge and develop new economic opportunities. It has three initiatives:

Technical and Vocational Skills Development (TVSD),
Lifelong Learning for Farmers (L3F), and
Healthy Communities.

eLearning (previously the eighth programme area) and Gender are cross-cutting themes that underpin and complement all seven initiatives.

The Commonwealth Educational Media Centre for Asia (CEMCA), COL’s regional agency in Asia, promotes appropriate and low-cost technology options.

COL’s eLearning for International Organisations initiative
responds to the capacity enhancement needs of international
organisations through fee-for-service arrangements. COL has
developed and delivered courses in effective communication, report
writing, operational data and debt management, gender
mainstreaming and youth development.

Mission:

COL’s mission is to help governments expand the scale, efficiency and quality of learning by using appropriate technologies, particularly those that support “open and distance learning” (ODL).

Strategic goals:

Quality education for all Commonwealth citizens
Human resource development in the Commonwealth
Harnessing ODL and technologies to achieve development
goals

Impact statement:

A substantial and equitable increase in the number of Commonwealth citizens acquiring the knowledge and skills for leading productive and healthy lives, through formal and nonformal open and distance learning opportunities

Core Strategies

COL has identified five core strategies to achieve outcomes and impact: partnerships, capacity, materials, models and policy. In practice, most COL activities incorporate more than one of these strategies and, in some cases, all five.

Partnership

Partnership refers to a dynamic relationship between organisations and institutions based on mutually agreed goals with clearly defined roles and responsibilities. COL leverages its modest resources through partnerships in virtually everything that it does.

COL has two main types of partnerships. Upstream partnerships (that is, strategic partnerships) enable COL to broaden its vision and complement its resources. Such partnerships can be with multilateral organisations (e.g., UNESCO), regional bodies (e.g., the Economic Community of West African States), national governments or commercial organisations (e.g., Microsoft). Downstream partnerships come into play at the implementation level. COL partners with government agencies, public institutions, civil society and other organisations to improve and extend teaching and learning services to people in the developing Commonwealth.

Both kinds of partnerships are based on collaboration and shared values and goals.

During this Three-Year Plan, COL will leverage existing networks, act as the catalyst for bilateral linkages, and expand its circle of partners by promoting:

both south-south and north-south collaboration;
public-private partnerships; and
regional and international co-operation.

Capacity

Capacity development refers to processes that enable people and organisations to achieve their objectives more effectively. This can mean training but also networking and other processes that enable and empower people and organisations to develop appropriate policies, adopt and adapt models, and develop and use materials. In short, capacity development pervades all COL activities. It focuses primarily on human resource development.

During this Three-Year Plan, COL will continue to:

invest in the capacity development of partners in all aspects of ODL, including policy;
develop capacity, particularly in the use of appropriate technologies; and
promote sustainability by developing capacity in monitoring and evaluation and gender mainstreaming.

Materials

By materials, COL means learning and teaching resources. These can be course materials, toolkits and frameworks for quality or policy-making. Course materials, and often also the toolkits and frameworks, are produced by partners with COL support.

During this Three-Year Plan, COL will:

publish all its new materials as OER;
promote the development and use of OER by others; and
build capacity in materials development.

Models

A model is a coherent set of structures and processes that has been shown to work in more than one context to achieve specific results. Models can range from broad approaches — such as Lifelong Learning for Farmers (L3F) or the blended application of community radio for achieving health-related outcomes — to more specific instruments, such as the COL Review and Improvement Model (COL RIM) or the COL instructional design (ID) template.

During this Three-Year Plan, COL will strive to innovate and achieve scale by:

developing new models relevant to 21st-century challenges; and
promoting the replication of models, particularly through south-south co- operation.

Policies

A policy is a high-level statement of ambition that specifies the outcomes to be achieved and that guides decision-making through a defined course of action. COL supports the development of policy for organisations and institutions as well as for governments.

During this Three-Year Plan, COL will continue to:

be proactive in policy advocacy for ODL and OER;
support regional and national policies for ODL, OER and ICTs;
build capacity to develop institutional and organisational policies in ODL and OER; and
promote the effective implementation of policy.