 Now, it is my pleasure to invite Assistant Director-General for Education, Mr. Kien-Tang, to take the floor. Madam Director-General, your excellencies, distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen, dear colleagues, I'm pleased to be here with you today for the launch of the UNESCO Commonwealth's Learning Guidelines for Open Educational Resources for Higher Education. This document is the results of the very fruitful partnership between UNESCO and the Commonwealth's Learning. So once again, I welcome Sir John Daniel, President of the Commonwealth's Learning, and also 10 years ago he was my boss when he was an ADG education in this house. As you know, information and communication technologies are dramatically increasing the rate of transfer of information through global communication systems leading to more sharing of knowledge. And thanks to the wide array of ICT-based programs available to us, we are able to create and share an enormous number of learning resources. This means more students and a more diverse student body. However, the changes are not only related to access. ICT is also transforming learning and teaching practices contributing to better quality education. And early today, I attend the Education Commission for the whole day. And during that meeting, we ask our Member State what are the major challenges for our priorities, for their country's education and development. Representatives of 50 countries took floor this morning. Many of them, I say at least 40 of them, mentioned using ICT in education is a top priority for them to expand access to education and to improve the quality of their education system. So UNESCO Commonwealth's Learning guidelines are part of UNESCO's fall-up to the 2009 World Conference on Higher Education and the new Dynamics of Higher Education Research for Social Change and Development. This major conference we took place here at headquarters in July 2009, underlined the role of ICTs in widening access to quality education. And these guidelines were developed after broad consultations with stakeholders throughout the world and can be used by governments, by higher education institutions, other providers, academic staff, student bodies, and quality assurance accreditation and recognition bodies. They provide policy advice on using OERs to support quality teaching and learning, setting out a key suggestion for integrating them into higher education. This will not only help improve the quality of programs and teaching, but also reduce costs. I'm sure you will find the guidelines extremely useful and interesting, and hope you will be moved to share them with all the relevant stakeholders in your own countries. Thank you. Thank you, Ken, for these remarks. And now it is my pleasure to invite Sir John Daniel to launch the UNESCO and COLE OER policy guidelines. Sir John, you have a floor. Thank you, Janice. Deputy Minister, Mr. Sanly Simatar, Assistant Director General, Excellencies, Ladies and Gentlemen, it's a pleasure to be with you again for this launch of UNESCO's Open Educational Resources Platform and the UNESCO COLE guidelines for Open Educational Resources in Higher Education. The common thread that runs through yesterday's and today's launches is the conviction that ICT information and communications technology can make a major difference to education, training and learning generally. Indeed, the Commonwealth of Learning was established by the Commonwealth Heads of Government over 20 years ago because they believed that the mass media and ICT were far too important to be left to the entertainment industry. And furthermore, I remember when I started getting interested in educational technology in the 1970s and 80s, UNESCO was a powerhouse of international thinking on this topic through the leadership of R. E. J. Z. Over recent decades, tremendous progress has been made, and in particular by building on a succession of new media and technology, open and distance learning has advanced in spectacular strides so that tens of millions of people worldwide are now furthering their education as distance learners using a wide variety of technologies. New institutions have grown rapidly to meet this need and some have become so large that they enroll more than a million students each. But there is a problem. Institutions dedicated solely to technology-mediated learning are doing well. However, the introduction of ICT into teaching in conventional institutions, school classrooms and university campuses has been much less successful. It has been less successful because of two fundamental problems. First, ICT cannot improve education in classroom settings unless teachers know how to use them. Second, teachers cannot use ICT effectively unless they have appropriate learning materials to use with the hardware. Yesterday's and today's launches have addressed these two issues in turn. Last evening, UNESCO's ICT Competency Framework for Teachers demonstrated a solution to the issue of teacher training, and Col is now working with UNESCO and the Commonwealth Secretariat to implement this competency framework in the Caribbean, Southern Africa and other parts of the Commonwealth. Tonight our focus is on the second issue, the lack of materials for use with ICT, and our topic is Open Educational Resources, OER. Educators have long desired to share teaching and learning materials, but until recently sharing has encountered three obstacles. First, there is the Not Invented Here syndrome. Thankfully, the rich resources of the internet and social software are steadily curing that affliction because most teachers no longer want to spend their time reinventing the wheel. Second, until materials development went digital, sharing them was tiresome. And third, intellectual property rights were problematic. Copyrighted material was often buried in learning materials alleged to be free of restriction. OER remove these last obstacles. First, they're easy to exchange and adapt, and second, open licenses for sharing OER allow you to distribute and adapt them with confidence. And finally, very importantly for UNESCO, OER can facilitate exchanges that are genuinely multi-directional and multinational. At the OER session at the 2009 World Conference on Higher Education here, the University of South Africa's Barney Pityana crossed swords with his fellow South African, Brenda Gawley, of the UK Open University, with Barney Pityana arguing that OER could promote a form of intellectual neocolonialism. Happily, that is not the reality. In the Programme for Teacher Education in Sub-Saharan Africa, TESA, 13 African universities are working together to produce and use OER. And last year, 320,000 African teachers in 10 countries adapted and used these OERs, which are available in Arabic, English, French and Kiswahili. So OER are spreading through Africa and around the world. But we must face the fact that OER have not yet fully entered the bloodstream of education. For that to happen, OER must feature in the policies of governments and institutions. And this was the challenge that UNESCO and Coal took up two years ago after the 2009 UNESCO General Conference of our project, taking OER beyond the OER community policy and capacity for developing countries. We organised a series of seven workshops on OER for senior educational decision makers in Africa and Asia, and have prepared two documents to support the next stage of the campaign. The first is a basic guide to OER written by South Africa's Neil Butcher and the editorial guidance of Asher Kanwar of Coal and Stemenko-Uvalich Trumbich of UNESCO. The second document, which we launched this evening, is Guidelines for OER in Higher Education, which were drafted by Zennett Vroglu of UNESCO and Trudy van Vijk of Coal with the aid of an international committee and online consultation. The format of these guidelines for OER was loosely modelled on the guidelines for quality provision in cross-border higher education that UNESCO published with the OECD in 2005. In the next phase of the project, for which we are grateful for support from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, we shall focus particularly on cultivating government support for OER. In the period between now and the World Congress on OER at UNESCO next June, we shall interact with governments worldwide in order to develop an inventory of their current practices and policies for increasing access to educational material. These OER guidelines, especially those addressed to governments, will illuminate the drafting of a declaration for next June's World Congress on OER. We hope for a declaration that will express government support for the principle that when educationally useful material is developed with public funds, it should be made freely available. We're fortunate to have Stamenko Ruvlitsch Trumbich as the principal consultant for this project because she has the perfect background for the task. In 2005, she organised the process that led to the UNESCO OECD guidelines on quality provision in cross-border higher education, and in 2009, she was the Executive Secretary of UNESCO's 2009 World Conference on Higher Education that flagged the importance of OER. She's thoroughly familiar with COLE, with the OECD, and, of course, with UNESCO, from which she retired two months ago as head of higher education. Today, we launch the guidelines for OER in higher education in the two languages of UNESCO headquarters, English and French, but I'm delighted to learn that funds are now available from UNESCO to translate them into the other UN languages and Portuguese. So colleagues, colleagues proud to launch these guidelines with you this evening and looks forward to working closely with UNESCO to foster support from governments for the important tool for educational development that OER represent. Thank you.