The Commonwealth of Learning (COL), was established in 1987 by Commonwealth Heads of Government to create and widen access to opportunities for learning, making use of the potential offered by distance education and by the application of communication technologies to education.
Within higher education, the Commonwealth of Learning supports policy development and implementation for Open and Distance Learning (ODL), Open Educational Resources (OER), Authentic Assessment, Technology-enabled learning, Quality assurance and Employability.
The COL engagement with the National Council for Higher Education (NCHE), began in October 2022, to explore the support that NCHE can obtain from COL to leverage the quality of higher education in Malawi. This led to the development of a COL-NCHE agreement to engage in a co-funding arrangement to execute two activities.
The first one was to develop standards and guidelines for the delivery of Open and Distance e-Learning (ODeL) programmes and assessment tools for ODeL institutions and programmes. The second activity was to train Reviewers for the assessment of ODeL institutions and programmes.
The ODeL assessment tools were successfully developed and approved by the Council, and 35 Reviewers drawn from accredited higher education institutions were trained to support the assessment of ODeL institutions and programmes to ensure that quality standards are adhered to in the delivery of ODeL programmes.
Currently, a new COL-NCHE agreement has just been signed to facilitate the capacity building of the members of the NCHE Quality Assurance Department on recognition of prior learning and micro-credentials and the development of guidelines for the same.