Open and Distance Learning for Sustainable Development

There are now close to a hundred of these in the market and COL is involved with UNESCO
and the World Bank's Infodev in doing an assessment of them. The chances are that within a
few years, equipment will be much less of a problem as costs continue to fall.
COL has also been instrumental in developing what we could call a virtual printing press.
Technically speaking, this is software, but its potential impact in widening access to printbased
learning materials could be compared to Gutenberg's invention of printing. Although an
increasing number of teachers have access to the Internet at work, the majority of learners in
the Commonwealth will not have connectivity in the foreseeable future. COL therefore made
it a priority to develop an e-learning technology to produce customised print materials from
any Mediawiki software installation.
We worked with the Wikimedia Foundation Inc., which oversees Wikipedia, the largest free
content repository in the world, and a company called PediaPress to develop an open source
technology that allows educators to build their own print collections from different pages to
give them a unique print-based study guide.
The materials are produced in portable document format (pdf) which can easily be reproduced
locally and mailed to learners through more conventional means. You can experiment with
this technology on COL's WikiEducator. The potential impact is huge because at a technical
level we now have the means to provide access to a free encyclopaedia in print format for
every teacher and learner in the world. In this way COL is helping to connect the
unconnected.
Software
Software is the enabler. It is the means to achieve our educational aims of designing teachinglearning
interactions and developing content. Software should support what educators do best
rather than constrain them. COL respects the freedom of educators to teach with the
technologies, curricula and learning materials of their choice whether that involves
proprietary or open source software. Teachers and institutions should choose the best tool for
the job in the light of their own circumstances.
In any case, in this fast-changing world, educational institutions have more pressing
challenges than personal software choices. One is the interoperability of digital content
among different systems and the use of open standards. The reason that the Internet grew
exponentially was because of interoperable technologies, such as specifications, guidelines,
software, and tools.
For example, the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) is an open specification administered
by the World Wide Web consortium that defines the basic building blocks of a web page.
Open standards enable private software companies and open source developers to speak the
same language, which leads to a wide choice of browsers, editors and authoring tools that
produce interoperable content.
There is an encouraging trend towards greater openness, for example in the area of wordprocessing
with the introduction of the Open Packaging Convention. COL urges all
concerned to work through the issues so that we can exchange documents more freely
between systems. This is not a game of winner take all, but rather of finding the best answers
for all the world's computer users. We believe there is enough maturity and technical skill to
accomplish this.
Beware of claims that e-learning is cheap. Like all distance education, the major cost is the
time that teachers, learning designers, graphic artists and editors spend developing high
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