01. Research & Publications

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Open Access
A Systematic Study of the Literature on Career Guidance Expert Systems for Students: Implications for ODL
(2022-11-21) Gunwant, Shilpa; Panda, Santosh
The continual evolution of employment opportunities in the present industrial era has raised the need for career-long expert advice. Similar to other fields, thankfully technology has come to our rescue in the area of career guidance also. This paper presents a systematic review of Expert Systems (ES) developed for career guidance, course selection and evaluation of students in the past ten years. The popular research databases Google Scholar and Science Direct were used for obtaining the relevant research papers through broad keywords. The keywords were refined to identify the articles related to rule-based, case-based and fuzzy logic-based ES used for career guidance. A total of twenty-five peer-reviewed relevant articles with full-text available online was selected for the final study. In order to avoid duplicity, technical reports and unreferenced literature were excluded. The review identifies the relatively high weight given by the researchers to rule-based systems owing to their simplicity and broad applicability. However, the relative merits and demerits of rule-based, case-based and fuzzy logic-based ES are highly dependent on the field of application. Nevertheless, ES find wide applications in the area of career guidance and have the potential to enhance the career guidance accessibility of the most remote students.
Open Access
Accelerating Gender Parity
(2016-03-08) Kanwar, Asha
Video message delivered for International Women's Day 2016, 8 March 2016 by Professor Asha Kanwar, President & CEO, Commonwealth of Learning.
Open Access
Addressing the Successes and Failures of the Campaign for Universal Primary Education
(2010) Daniel, John
The report card of the global campaign to achieve universal primary education (UPE), which began at the Jomtien Conference in 1990 and was reinforced by the Dakar Forum in 2000, is a blend of success and failure. Both present new challenges. Getting 40 million additional children into primary school between 1999 and 2007 was a considerable success. It has created a growing surge of children now looking for secondary schooling. In many developing countries they will not find it. However, on current projections the 20-year campaign for UPE will still leave 50 million children out of primary school by the target date of 2015. The paper proposes responses to each challenge. 400 million children aged 12 to 17 are not in secondary school. All feasible methods must be used to expand secondary systems. Open schooling, the application of distance learning at the secondary level, is a cost-effective way of increasing access. A primary requisite for completing the UPE campaign is to recruit and train 2 million teachers. To expand secondary education and replace retiring teachers will require an additional 8 million teachers. Scaling up teacher education requires much wider use of distance learning, which also provides a mechanism for the desirable reform of moving the focus from pre-service to in-service training.
Open Access
Assistive Technologies: Inclusive Teaching Guidelines for Educators
(2020-09) Ramsamy-Iranah, Sabrina D.; Maguire, Martin
In education, assistive technologies include devices or services that increase learners’ independence, participation or achievement to ensure that they reach their full potential. This guide describes how educators using assistive technology can promote an inclusive environment that accommodates the different ways learners assimilate information and learn. It introduces them to a range of assistive technologies that address individual learners’ needs and help them overcome the barriers they face. It is important that educators understand assistive technologies as ‘technologies for all’ and normalise their use in the classroom, thus ensuring everyone benefits and reducing the risk of stigmatisation.
Open Access
Blended Course Learnability Evaluation Checklist
(2018) Commonwealth of Learning
This blended course learnability evaluation checklist can be used for measuring the quality of the course. It can be used as a developmental tool by the teachers developing the blended course.
Open Access
Book Review: Adoption and Impact of OER in the Global South
(2018-07) Perris, Kirk; Gaskell, Anne
Adoption and Impact of OER in the Global South takes the reader around the world to learn about developments in open educational resources (OER) from a range of emerging world perspectives. Contributions emanate from South America, Sub-Saharan Africa, and South and Southeast Asia, offering the reader coverage of more than half the world’s population.
Open Access
Book Review: An Introduction to Cybersecurity for Busy People: Learn how to be safe and secure in the digital world
(2020-07-20) West, Paul
This book is short and purposefully presented as a quick read for those who need an overview on the topic of cyber security. Keats speaks about the threats users and organisations face, presents examples of typical threats and suggests ideas for preventing threats. His style is easy to read for the business and general reader and is not aimed at the IT specialist. It provides both a useful background and information to better position many people to know what questions to ask and how to understand the threats without being an IT expert.
Open Access
Book Review: Assignments as Controversies: Digital Literacy and Writing in Classroom Practice by Ibrar Bhatt
(2019-03) Passos, Rosario
Assignments as controversies tells a multifaceted story about academic assignments and how they are completed in the classroom. It looks at the complex task of assignment writing from a perspective of the different practices the task entails and the actors that enact them. Acknowledging the social aspect of literacy, informed by Literacy Studies theory, the author explores the impact of ‘the social’ on meaning making, the disconnect between personal and curricular literacies and ponders how the practices of assignment writing should contribute to the improvement of assignments as assessment tools.
Open Access
Book Review: Dede & Richards, Eds., The 60-Year Curriculum: New Models for Lifelong Learning in the Digital Economy
(2022-03-19) Olcott Jr, Don; Panda, Santosh
The 60-Year curriculum: New models for lifelong learning in the digital economy examines new vantage points for higher education reform and global shifts in workforce development driven primarily by new models of lifelong learning. The chapter authors have provided insightful and occasionally provocative analyses of how universities in the digital economy will need to reconceptualise their models of lifelong learning given the impacts of digital technologies and increases in life expectancy resulting in longer careers and the need for education, training, upskilling-re- skilling-upgrading. In sum, these trends mean that “what we learn, when we learn it, how we learn it, and who we learn it from will all change” (Scott, p. 25).
Open Access
Book Review: Depover, C., Orivel, F. (2012). Developing countries in the elearning era (Vol. 96). Paris: UNESCO IIPE.
(2014) Huelsmann, Thomas
This review will depart from the standard format of a review, which usually starts by giving a brief summary of the reviewed item. Given that the book is readily available online at this URL and includes a good advance organizer in its introduction (pp. 1718) we will skip this task and directly turn to discuss the book. // I will further depart from usual practice by shortly introducing my own conceptual framework since it may help to understand better my comments on the book.
Open Access
Book Review: Dron, Jon and Terry Anderson (2014). Teaching Crowds - Learning and Social Media, Edmonton: AU Press.
(2015) Ferreira-Meyers, Karen
This volume written by Dron and Anderson consists of ten chapters and is completed by a reference section and a useful index. The preface details the book’s objectives, after briefly explaining the ambiguous nature of its title (the book is about how to teach crowds, but also about how crowds teach): to describe and discuss the theoretical foundations of the use of social software for learning and to explore ways that such software is used to support and enable learners to learn. In brief, the book is mainly about the use of social software for teaching and learning.
Open Access
Book Review: Education and International Development: Theory, Practice and Issues
(2015) Pulist, S K
Education has been a driving force for developmental activities in all spheres associated with human development. Development as a phenomenon can acquire many forms, depending upon nature, cause and purpose. However, the relation of education to development is manyfold. It can be construed, in other words, that the role and contribution of education in development is crucial and immense. The current book, Education and international development, by Clive Harber, tries to define the concept of development from an international perspective and links it with educational interventions at different levels in the developing world.
Open Access
Book Review: Flexible Pedagogy, Flexible Practice (Notes From the Trenches of Distance Education)
(2016-11) Winkelmans, Tim
In summary, the publication achieves the editors’ purposes. It delineates the state of flexible learning in higher education, circa 2010, within the context of available and emergent digital technologies. The contributions provide a mosaic of government and institutional policy directions and economic pressures that profoundly shaped specific teaching and learning decisions. The sections are logically sequenced and lead to a thoughtful and comprehensive concluding chapter. The case studies are highly readable and at times visceral, while the conceptual chapters anchor the experiences in principles and research-based practices.
Open Access
Book Review: Identity, Pedagogy and Technology-enhanced Learning: Supporting the Processes of Becoming a Tradesperson
(2023-03-20) Neal, Terry; Panda, Santosh
Identity, pedagogy and technology-enhanced learning supporting the processes of becoming a tradesperson is a good place to start if you want to understand the practice of vocational education and training (VET). Each chapter includes a summary of relevant research, references an extensive bibliography, and introduces various frameworks to make sense of, and support the application of, the concepts discussed. It covers modern use of technology in trades teaching and VET research and the author illustrates points with evidence from her own experience.
Open Access
Book Review: Learning as Development: Rethinking International Education in a Changing World
(2018-12) Balasubramanian, K; Gaskell, Anne
Daniel Wagner’s Learning as development is an important contribution in this area and, as Marlaine Lockheed of the World Bank points out, the volume “humanizes and broadens the discussion of education and development”. Wagner’s book calls for rethinking education and defining its relationship with international development. It calls for moving towards “an agenda that puts human development closer to the center of global ambitions and prioritises learning as the thread that binds each phase of human life into a coherent whole”. // The world has come together and has agreed to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to be realised by 2030. According to Wagner, the shift from the “economic growth” models to a human and sustainable development approach has necessitated a need to rethink education in the context of international development, particularly with reference to equity vis-à-vis poor and marginalised communities. While lamenting the siloed approach in education, Wagner offers a four interconnected and overlapping quadrant learning framework vis-à-vis learning contexts and learning practices. This framework covers the entire gamut of learning: structured non-formal education, less structured non-formal learning, structured formal education, less structured in-school learning. The conventional educational policies and programmes offered at educational institutions in many developing countries are sectoral and focus exclusively on structured formal education.
Open Access
Book Review: Mobile Learning: Transforming the Delivery of Education and Training
(2016) Pulist, S K
The book primarily covers different mobile devices and technology being used; design and development of learning material compatible with the smart devices; and strategies for delivery of learning and training through these hand-held devices. The book also examines the range of uses of mobile devices in learning and presents a canvas of theoretical and practical aspects of formal and informal uses of these devices.
Open Access
Book Review: Moocs and Open Education in the Global South: Challenges, Successes and Opportunities
(2020-03-20) Anderson, Terry
Many Western educators live under the mistaken impression that Massive Open Online Courses are a waning fad that never lived up to the disruptive potential claimed by its early evangelists. However, even so-called educational experts are often unaware of the long-term impact of educational technologies after the initial glow and flush of venture capital has faded. MOOCs certainly fall into this category. Class Central reports that in 2019 some 13,500 MOOC courses were delivered to over 110,000,000 learners worldwide (an annual increase of over 18%). // The MOOCs and Open Education book promises to be an important resource for educators globally. It not only provides concrete examples of MOOC and OER use in countries throughout the Global South but also deals with instructional design, effects of government policy, adoption issues, faculty and student perceptions of value, the state of research and more. Thus, it is an important and a timely publication.
Open Access
Book Review: Moon, Bob. (2013). Teacher Education and the Challenge of Development: A Global Analysis. New York: Routledge.
(2014) Younger, Mike
This is a wide-ranging, ambitious book that sets out to explore the connectivities between teacher education and the development agenda, in the context of low and middle-income economies. In four distinct sections, it brings together authors who have engaged centrally with the debates over the last two decades to explore international dilemmas about teacher supply and teacher quality, contextualised within large population countries and other countries within the global South, and explores new strategies for teacher education and teacher development.
Open Access
Book Review: Online Distance Education: Towards a Research Agenda
(2016-11) DeVries, Irwin
As seen by Otto Peters in his foreword to this substantial volume, the early days of correspondence-based distance education garnered little attention from researchers. As distance education became more widely adopted and researched, a prevalent theme involved comparisons of distance education with traditional face-to-face methods, mostly in attempts to prove the equivalence of the two. While such studies were fraught with methodological challenges, they arose in response to the perceived need for this new kid on the block to prove its legitimacy to an often skeptical academic constituency. // It is impossible in this short review to represent the breadth and depth of the chapters in this volume. Suffice it to say at this point that there is a cornucopia of recommendations for research agendas or projects throughout the chapters. Journal editors as well as faculty, who research and teach in online distance education, may find that this book increases their awareness of the research gaps. Further, combining topics or questions from the different areas has the potential to inspire entirely new lines of research. // This volume is an eye-opener, and it should be on the desk or device of every distance education researcher and student, particularly since the online PDF version is free for download. I think it’s safe to say that it will serve the field of online distance education studies well for many years to come.
Open Access
Book Review: Open and Distance Non-formal Education in Developing Countries by Colin Latchem
(2019-03) Newman, Mairette
In compiling over 180 cases of successful open and distance non-formal education (ODL NFE) interventions from across the developing world, the late Colin Latchem, author of Open and distance non-formal education in developing countries, has broken new ground. Although a few authors have taken a comparable approach (e.g., Hanemann, & Scarpino, 2016; Siaciwena, 2000), none has come close to providing such a comprehensive overview, detailing not only with the scope and quality of work being done but also the variety of providers who work in disparate cultures and societies under the banner of ODL NFE. Readers will be impressed with the wide-ranging examples of rich and often innovative ways in which ODL NFE is being used. The cases span areas such as adult literacy, gender equity, sanitation, agriculture and entrepreneurship; they address the needs of out-of-school children, the community of persons with disabilities, illiterate farmers, persons in crisis affected contexts, and prisoners; and they describe solutions which use ‘no tech’, ‘low tech’ and ‘high tech’ tools. It is in this respect that the book serves as both an inspiration and practical guide for those working in the non-formal education sector, especially in developing countries, be they practitioners or policy makers.

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