 Teacher Education through Open and Distance Learning is a book edited by Patrick Alan Denaha and me, that is Abdrahman Umar. The book focuses on promoting a greater understanding of how open and distance learning can be used to address the true key challenges facing teacher education. Mainly the issue of quality, the quality of teachers and of teaching, and also the issue of supply or the provision of adequate teachers, particularly in the context of education for all. The chapters of the book were written by scholars of all regions of Europe, Africa, Asia, and the chapters focus on a number of issues. One is contemporary research on teacher education through open and distance learning, and the idea here is to understand what the research says about the efficacy or effectiveness of teacher education through open and distance learning. It also looks at the underlying principles and policies of teacher education through open and distance learning. What are the important principles that underlie or that guide the use of teacher education through open and distance learning? What do you support? What do you have to promote teacher education? It also looks at the various uses of open and distance learning to provide teacher education as specifically free service teacher education, in-service teacher education, continuing professional development of teachers, and so on. The book also addresses issues related to the use of ICT, that is the new information and communication technology in teacher education through open and distance learning. That includes, of course, the use of open education resources. There is a very low chapter by Professor Boko, one of the foremost authorities on open education resources. We will discuss the experience of the teacher education in sub-Saharan Africa consortium in terms of providing OERs that support the work of teachers in the classroom. Briefly, these are the main issues that the book seeks to address. But why was the book written? What was the rationale? What were we trying to achieve by getting these prominent scholars to come together and contribute to the debate on the use of open and distance learning for teacher education? I think the context for this book should be seen in terms of the commitment all countries have made to the goals of the Education for All program as articulated in the Dakar framework for Action 2000. And also in the context of the recent global monitoring report on FR, which was published recently by UNESCO. What comes out clearly from these and other publications, for example including the UNESCO Institute of Statistics report on teacher supply, you know. What comes out clearly is that there are huge shortfalls of teacher supply in nearly all the countries, of course the intensity differs from country to country. But particularly in the developing countries of Africa and Asia, one why we are talking about we need 10 million teachers before 2015 or by 2015. Africa alone needs about 4 million teachers. Now the issue is how can this number of teachers be provided before 2015 if we simply relied on conventional brick and mortar approaches to teacher training? What we obviously need is more innovative approaches such as how we can harness the potential of open and distance learning to train more teachers in order to meet the target set in the Dakar framework for Action. It is in this context that we brought together 10 scholars from different parts of the world to look at the various issues related to the use of open and distance learning to provide teacher education. The overall aim of course is to promote an understanding, an adequate understanding of how you can use open and distance learning in teacher education both for pre-service training and in-service training and also for continuing professional development. It is our hope that the readers of this book will come to a better understanding of how we can harness the potential of open and distance learning to train teachers of good quality in different regions of the world. Thank you.