 Good day. It is a pleasure to join you for this important academic ceremony of the Open University of the Netherlands. OUNL is a leading distance teaching university and so it is appropriate that I use a distance teaching technology for these brief remarks. I bring you greetings from the Commonwealth of Learning and congratulate the Open University on its impressive achievements as it reaches the important milestone of the handover of the rectorate. I begin by congratulating Professor Fred Mulder on his most distinguished tenure as rector of OUNL. During that tenure, his influence for good has been felt far beyond the Netherlands. He has been intensely involved in the development of open and distance learning across Europe and through his involvement in the resurrection of the International Council for Open and Distance Education, ICDE, he has achieved global impact. Professor Mulder is well liked and highly respected in international circles. As an international guest at your ceremony, I thank him on behalf of the world's distance educators for his outstanding contribution. I also offer our very best wishes to the new rector of OUNL, Professor Anja Oskang. The Open University is a special institution in the higher education system of the Netherlands and she inherits an excellent tradition of leadership going back to your founding president and my good friend, Dr. Gottfried Liebrandt. We wish you a most successful tenure. I will begin with a few words about the Commonwealth of Learning or COL as everyone calls it and this will lead me naturally to speak about the special role of Open Universities. In his own address, Professor Mulder has spoken eloquently about the various elements of openness. I shall focus on just one of those dimensions, the openness of the content of learning. The Commonwealth of Learning is deeply engaged with the global movement to open up educational content and I shall give examples of our work. The open content movement has momentum but the battle for openness, transparency and sharing is not yet won. Open Universities have a special role in increasing that momentum and I shall refer to the involvement of the Open University of the Netherlands in OERs of which an important element is your UNESCO Chair in Open Educational Resources. The Commonwealth is a free association of 54 countries that are united by the values of equality, democracy, peace and good government. Openness and transparency are guiding principles in its work and these common values and principles unite a very disparate set of countries located all over the globe. Some, like India, are very large but two-thirds of the members are small states with populations of 1.5 million or fewer. Coal is an intergovernmental body created by the Commonwealth to help its members use a variety of technologies to expand and improve learning for development and that is our motto, Learning for Development. By development we refer to the Millennium Development Goals, the Goals of Education for All and those Commonwealth values of democracy and openness. We are a small organisation of only 40 people but we impact a range of global learning challenges, formal and informal. To help expand and improve formal education we show how distance learning can scale up secondary schooling and expand the supply of teachers. Both challenges are huge. Worldwide there are some 400 million children between the ages of 12 and 17 who are not in secondary school and we also need 10 million more teachers. Coal is also helping to expand tertiary education in small countries through an exciting programme called the Virtual University for Small States of the Commonwealth. Expanding informal learning is the other part of our work. It focuses on the huge global challenge of giving tens of millions of young people the skills to enable them to earn better livelihoods. A particular facet of this is learning for farming because despite massive migration to the cities, improving the prosperity of rural communities is crucial both to food security and global development. The mission of the Commonwealth of Learning is the use of technology in learning, which is also the mission of the Open University of the Netherlands. But what is the fundamental contribution of technology to learning? Governments in the public want three outcomes from their education systems. Access to be as wide as possible, quality to be as high as possible and cost to be as low as possible. Creating a triangle of vectors from these three outcomes makes the challenge clear. With traditional methods of face-to-face teaching, this is an iron triangle. You want to stretch the triangle like this to give greater access, higher quality and lower costs, but you can't. Try extending access by packing more students into each classroom and you will be accused of damaging quality. Try improving quality with better learning resources and the cost will go up. Try cutting costs and you will endanger both access and quality. This iron triangle has hindered the expansion of education throughout history. It has created in the public mind an insidious link between quality and exclusivity. This link need not exist, but it still drives the admission policies of many universities which define their quality by the people that they exclude. But technology can transform the iron triangle into a flexible triangle. By using technology you can achieve wider access, higher quality and lower costs all at the same time. This is a revolution. It has never happened before and this is what technology can achieve in education if well used. How does technology do this? The fundamental principles of technology articulated two centuries ago by the economist Adam Smith, our division of labour, specialisation, economies of scale and the use of machines and communications media. That is what you do at OUNL. In a traditional university the individual academic carries out all the steps in the teaching process, designing the curriculum, preparing learning materials, teaching the course and assessing the students. Here at OUNL these tasks are divided between many people who can specialise in different functions and become very skilled at them. So my key point is that the principles of technology not only give you economies of scale, but also the quality of service that goes with specialisation. And that is why OUNL came top in the National Survey of Student Satisfaction last year and second for three years before that. Mention of specialisation and economies of scale brings me naturally to open educational resources. In open universities groups of specialised academics develop quality course materials. This is an expensive process, but open universities can amortise those costs over many students. But regular universities do not have that option and therefore do not invest in preparing high quality learning materials. Open educational resources change this picture completely. They allow students everywhere to use high quality learning materials developed in other places. Because open educational resources have two vital qualities. First they are open and available so everyone can use them. And second and even more importantly they can be adapted for local use. Materials from elsewhere are never exactly what we need, but we can convert them to what we need by adapting them and OERs allow that. Let me give you three examples of how coal uses OERs. First we are part of the TESA programme for teacher education in sub-Saharan Africa. This consortium of 13 African universities and international partners has produced hundreds of OERs for teacher education. They are available in Arabic, English, French and Ki Swahili and were used by half a million teachers across Africa last year which is a remarkable combination of adaptability and scale. Second six countries Botswana, Lesotho, Namibia, Seychelles, Trinidad and Tobago and Zambia are working together with coal to create as OERs the complete curriculum of the last two years of secondary school. The six countries have divided up the subjects between them and each will adapt the OERs prepared in the other countries to meet its own national needs. Third through the virtual university for small states of the Commonwealth 32 countries are working together to create e-learning courses as OERs which each country can then adapt and use. These tiny countries are short of academic resources on every dimension so this is a revolution for them. These examples show that OERs can have a transformative impact globally at all levels of education and in all kinds of institutions. They hold a particular promise for developing countries provided that the global sharing of OERs is multi-directional from south to north as well as from north to south. The OER movement must not become an exercise in intellectual neocolonialism. Open universities and ODL institutions like OUNL have a duty to lead the movement away from this danger. I hope that you will encourage teachers in the north to use OERs developed in the south. This is an opportunity to demonstrate worldwide the leadership that you have shown in the Netherlands. Leadership is not just a matter of developing OERs. Universities also have a research function and I'm particularly delighted as a former assistant director general for education at UNESCO that OUNL has a UNESCO chair in OERs. The chair of your National Commission for UNESCO will explain to you what UNESCO chairs are so I will end with just two observations. The first is that the Commonwealth of Learning as a strong promoter of OERs looks forward to working with OUNL in the context of this chair. The second is to express my great satisfaction that Professor Fred Mulder who has done so much to drive forward the OER movement both in your country and internationally will hold the UNESCO chair. This is a perfect way for him to continue to have a major impact in the field of ODL as he hands over the leadership of the Open University of the Netherlands to Professor Anja Oskamp. I very much look forward personally to working with Professor Oskamp and Professor Mulder in their new capacities. I congratulate them both and I offer my very best wishes to the Open University of the Netherlands on this happy occasion. Thank you.