Open and Distance Education in the Global Environment

Abstract

Collaboration in the Time of Competition, Presented at: International Conference on Open and Distance Education International Council for Open and Distance Education (ICDE) Theme: Open & Distance Education in the Global Environment: Opportunities for Collaboration, New Delhi, India, 19-23 November 2005, written by: Sir John Daniel, Asha Kanwar (Commonwealth of Learning), Stamenka Uvalić-Trumbić and Zeynep Varoglu (UNESCO) presented by Sir John Daniel // Our title is Collaboration in the Time of Competition. This paraphrases the title of a novel by the Columbian Nobel laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Love in the Time of Cholera3. In that remarkable book he juxtaposes love, the most sublime human emotion, with cholera, a dreaded and often mortal disease. Without aspiring to Marquez' literary brilliance we shall juxtapose the seemingly contradictory concepts of collaboration and competition. Is harnessing them together a paradox or a possibility? Is it rhetoric or reality? // Marquez draws parallels between the symptoms of love and those of cholera. At the end of the novel a quarantine of cholera makes eternal love possible. Less ambitiously, we shall try to demonstrate the symbiosis between collaboration and competition. We shall examine their roles in the recent history of distance education and look at collaboration today. A variety of successful international examples shows that collaboration is an essential underpinning to the healthy competition that can bring learning opportunities to millions. We shall end with comments on what makes collaboration successful. // From national to international: the evolving scope of distance education