 Greetings to all of you attending the STEMFest 2015 and the session on Skilling a Nation's Future, organized by the Open and Distance Learning Association of Australia. I thank Dr. Som Naidu, President of Audela, for the invitation. Thank you, Som. Many of you know my organization, The Common Wealth of Learning, or CALL. For the benefit of those who don't, a very quick introduction. We are an intergovernmental organization established by the Commonwealth Heads of Government when they met in Vancouver in 1987. We've been in beautiful British Columbia ever since. Our mission is to help the 53 Commonwealth Member States and institutions to harness the potential of distance learning and technologies for expanding access to education and training. The theme of this session is Skilling a Nation's Future. This is also a top priority for Commonwealth Member States. It is a very young Commonwealth with 60% of its population under the age of 30. Governments are looking for cost-effective ways in which the youth can be skilled. In fact, the Indian Prime Minister Modi has called for the three S's. Skills, Speed, Scale. A Nation's Future can be secure if skills are developed at speed and at scale. The organizers have asked us to address two key questions. What are the big game changers in this space? And what are the key priorities for learning and teaching? First, let me identify three distinct but interconnected game changers. One, technology-enabled learning. Two, open education. And three, a networked world. Technology-enabled learning includes, as we know, distance learning, online provision and MOOCs. Policymakers and practitioners embraced these learning technologies as they helped increase access and equity, reduce costs and improve quality in higher education. As more countries began to achieve universal primary education, there was a huge demand for secondary schooling. Even today in sub-Saharan Africa, the transition rate from primary to secondary schools is only 40%. Distance learning was then introduced to expand access to secondary schooling. Similarly, the need for more trained teachers led to the use of distance learning in teacher training. So we can see that the use of distance learning was no longer limited to higher education alone, but now covers all sectors of formal education. When the international community adopted the Millennium Development Goals or MDGs, call began to look for ways in which distance learning could be harnessed to achieve these development goals. This meant deploying distance learning in non-formal and informal sectors as well for a more cost-effective approach. Here is Rihanna Khatun from Bangladesh who started a poultry farming enterprise as a result of this training. Using the flexible and blended learning approach, over 6,000 women have become trained in income-generating skills and more than 1,000 new small businesses have been started in Bangladesh alone under the non-formal skill development program supported by call. The second game changer is open education. This includes flexible workplace-based learning, open education resources or OER and open access policies. Let me just focus on OER. As we know, OER are teaching, learning and research materials, digital or otherwise, either available in the public domain or within open license. The open license allows different degrees of freedom to use, reuse, revise and redistribute any work without barriers or restrictions. In 2012, call and UNESCO with the support of the Hewlett Foundation organized the World OER Congress in Paris that resulted in the OER Paris Declaration. This has had a major impact on governments around the world. Within the Commonwealth, countries as diverse as India and Antigua and Barbuda have adopted OER policies. In Canada, three provincial governments of British Columbia, Alberta and Saskatchewan have committed to promoting OER and open textbooks. In addition, call has developed a directory of OER in skills development and this becomes a useful resource for anyone anywhere in the world. This openness has been extended to calls MOOCs for development. So what's a MOOC for development? A MOOC for development is a MOOC platform which can be offered in low bandwidth situations and uses blended approaches. Call in partnership with IIT Kanpur offered an audio MOOC for skilling gardeners delivered through basic mobile phones using audio content. The content of these MOOCs is now available as OER so anybody can run this skills development program. The third game changer is an increasingly networked world. While in North America there are over 80 internet users per 100 persons, in developing countries the average drops to 34%. However, the rise of mobile telephony has connected even the most remote and deprived. Call offers a new approach called the Lifelong Learning for Farmers or L3F. Call catalyzes the links between the civil society, experts and financial institutions to develop multimedia based learning. Research shows that for every dollar invested, income and assets worth $9 have been generated among these farmers in India who became lifelong learners using basic mobile phones. Not only are these L3F participants learning from experts but also from each other using networked technologies. As we can see the power of these game changers can be harnessed to provide skills at speed and scale. Now coming to the second question, what are the key priorities for learning and teaching? The Millennium Development Goals which have helped the international community to achieve many targets such as universal primary education will come to a close this year to be followed by the Sustainable Development Goals or SDGs that will define this development agenda for the next 15 years. Goal 4 of these 17 SDGs identified focuses on education. The objective of this goal is to ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and lifelong learning opportunities for all by 2030. The goal has several targets. One, quality education must lead to effective learning outcomes. Two, we must focus on developing skills for employment, entrepreneurship and global citizenship. And three, having qualified teachers in place will be critical to achieving these targets. We need to scale our young people at scale in the formal, non-formal and informal sectors. Traditional brick and mortar approaches will not be enough. Odl and technology-enabled learning will become more important than ever before. And with that, let me thank you for your kind attention. Thank you.