Prime Minister of Jamaica, the Most Honourable Portia Simpson Miller, will be guest speaker at the opening ceremony of the Fourth Pan Commonwealth Forum on Open Learning (PCF4), to be held at the Sunset Jamaica Grande, Ocho Rios, October 30-November 3, 2006.

Organized by the Commonwealth of Learning (COL) in association with a Caribbean consortium led by the UWI Distance Education Centre, the theme of PCF4 is “Achieving Development Goals: Innovation, Learning, Collaboration and Foundations”. Other members of the consortium are the Caribbean Association for Distance and Open Learning (CARADOL); the Jamaican Association for Distance and Open Learning (JADOL); the Trinidad & Tobago Distance Learning Association (TTDLA); and the Office of Continuing Education, Open and Distance Learning (OCEODL) at the University of Technology, Jamaica.

The Forum will bring together stakeholders from governments, educational institutions and allied professionals from throughout the world. Through discussions and panel presentations based on some 300 papers, participants will share ideas and help to set the agenda for using open and distance learning to advance international development through widening educational access, bridging the digital divide and applying advances in connecting technology to teaching and learning for development of communities and nations at large but especially in the less developed countries of the Commonwealth. COL’s Excellence in Distance Education Awards will be presented at PCF4.

The Asa Briggs Lecture held during the Forum will be delivered by Winston A. Cox, Inter-American Development Bank’s Alternate Executive Director for the Bahamas, Barbados, Guyana, Jamaica and Trinidad & Tobago and a former Deputy Secretary-General (Development Co-operation) of the Commonwealth Secretariat.

For more information on PCF4, please visit the Web-site at www.col.org/pcf4