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Tony Mays recently represented Saide at the COMOSA General Body Meeting and the sixth Pan Commonwealth Forum pre-conference workshop in New Delhi and provides a short reportback
The Commonwealth Open Schooling Association (COMOSA) was established on 23 November 2009 in New Delhi in order to network, develop advocacy programmes, build capacity of the open schooling system, share resources. The Association aims to undertake research and development to meet the challenges related to quality assurance and gender equity through Open Schooling in Commonwealth countries.
On Sunday 21 st November 2010, a General Body Meeting was held at the India Habitat Centre in New Delhi where a report on the first year's activities was tabled and a new Executive elected.
In its first year of operation:
- COMOSA hosted an International Workshop on ‘Monitoring and Evaluation for Open Schools' for the Asian Region in June 2010,
- Established the COMOSA Journal of Open Schooling (copy available in the Saide resource centre),
- Developed a Constitution and draft set of financial regulations and established a website ( http://comosa.org ).
In light of the progress made in establishing the association, the General Body Meeting re-elected the 2009-2010 executive for a second term, comprising Dr Sitansu S Jena (India) as President, Ms F Amey (Botswana) as Vice-President, Ms L Sampson-Ovid (Trinidad and Tobago) as Secretary and Prof D B Gupta (India) as Treasurer. COMOSA then held a two-day workshop on the theme ‘Research in Open Schooling' which was facilitated by Prof Santosh Panda. It was noted that whereas there is an extensive literature on the use of open and distance learning (ODL) in Higher Education, there are only a limited number of studies on the efficacy of open schooling and that this was probably a key growth area for ODL in the future as a result of factors such as the relative success of the Education for All focus on providing greater access to primary schooling.
After an opening plenary session, the workshop participants were divided into four groups to explore the further building of an institutional database (from a base of questionnaires completed prior to the workshop), the drafting of a research policy framework which Open Schools might then adapt for their own institutional needs, guidelines on the organisation and management of research in open schools and research priorities for open schooling.
Each group then presented its initial ideas to the plenary and responded to feedback from the floor. It was subsequently agreed that Prof Panda would develop a consolidated report which would be uploaded to the participant ‘basecamp' for comments and suggestions before being finalised and posted to the new COMOSA website. |
