On October 14-16, 2015, the 26th ICDE (International Council for Open and Distance Education) World Conference was held in Sun City, South Africa. The theme of the conference was "Growing Capacity for Sustainable Distance e-Learning Provision".
More than 900 delegates from 67 countries on five continents attended the conference. 280 papers were presented at the conference. Among them, five papers received the ICDE Prize. A delegation of 9 people led by the President Yang Zhijian of the Open University of China (OUC) were present at the meeting. Growth and Development of Distance Education in India and China: A Study on Policy Perspectives, written by Li Wei from the OUC and Ashok Gaba from Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU), was awarded the ICDE Prize for Innovation and Best Practice.
The conference was hosted by the University of South Africa (UNISA), and it lasted two and a half days. The conference covered 8 subjects:
- Open and Distance Learning policy, governance and sustainability
- Changing contexts
- Quality
- Curriculum development, pedagogy and assessment
- Student success, retention and support
- Research and the scholarship of teaching and learning
- Affordances and acceptance of established and emerging technologies
- Professional development and learning/growing capacity
At the opening ceremony, Tian Belawati, ICDE President and President of Universitas Terbuka, Indonesia, delivered a speech. Mandla Makhanya, President of the University of South Africa and the organizer of the 26th ICDE World Conference delivered a welcome speech. Asha Singh Kanwar, President & Chief Executive Officer of the Commonwealth of Learning (COL), Alan Tait, Professor at the Open University UK, and Tolly Mbwette, President of the ACDE and Vice-Chancellor of the Open University of Tanzania (OUT) attended the conference as representatives.
At the ICDE conference, the representatives delivered keynote speeches with rich content and broad vision. The keynote speeches included: Setting the Scene for the Rest of the Conference delivered by Tressie McMillan Cottom, professor of sociology at Virginia Commonwealth University; Technology Imperialism, the California ideology and the Future of Higher Education delivered by Audrey Watters, a famous scholar in the American educational technology field; The Paradoxes and Potential of Open Education, delivered by Laura Czerniewicz, Director of the newly formed Centre for Innovation in Learning and Teaching (CILT) at the University of Cape Town; Learner experience: Design, a new hope? delivered by Joyce Seitzinger, a lecturer in Blended Learning at Deakin University in Australia; and The complex landscape of ODel: implications for faculty development delivered by Aziza Ellozy, founding director of the Centre for Learning and Teaching at the American University in Cairo, Egypt.
During the Conference, the parallel sessions and the ICDE Standing Conference of Presidents (SCOP) were also held. Nearly 80 presidents and representatives from institutions of higher education around the world attended the conference, which had the theme "Opportunity and Challenge of Higher Education Management and Leadership". President of the OUC Yang Zhijian also attended the conference. Former Vice-Chancellor of the University of South Africa Barney Pityana and other internationally well-known scholars gave keynote speeches on improving leadership at the conference. They focused on the problems such as new opportunities and challenges of higher education management and leadership, the role of higher education in developing global moral culture, leadership challenges imposed by online e-teaching, and improving higher education by strengthening global cooperation. In addition, the representatives also discussed the main problems encountered in open and distance education and shared their experience in managing open and distance education.
On October 17-18, the High-Level Policy Forum and ICDE Executive Committee Meeting were held at the University of South Africa. In the Meeting, OUC President Yang Zhijian, ICDE President and President of Universitas Terbuka, Indonesia ,Tian Belawati, ICDE Secretary General Gard Titlestad, and other three Executive Committee members discussed many topics, including the results of the 26th ICDE World Conference, strategic planning for ICDE World Conference 2017-2020, cooperation between ICDE with UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization), and research projects on online open learning models. They reached a consensus on several of these issues.
ICDE President and President of Universitas Terbuka Tian Belawati delivering a speech
President of the University of South Africa and the organizer of the 26th ICDE World Conference delivers the welcome speech.
Participants from the OUC
The OUC's Li Wei (fourth from left) attends the award ceremony.
By Yu Minsheng, OUC