Collaboration in Distance Education in the Caribbean: Potential and Possibilities will be the theme of a public forum to be held on Tuesday May 6, 2003 at the University of the West Indies (UWI) St. Augustine Campus. The speaker, Dr. Dennis Irvine, former Caribbean Regional Adviser to the President, The Commonwealth of Learning (1996 – 2000) and a former Vice-Chancellor and Principal of the University of Guyana (1969 – 1982), has a wealth of experience in higher education, distance education, and science, technology and development. He is one of the founding members of the Jamaican Association for Distance and Open Learning.

The public forum is being organized under the auspices of the UNESCO-UWI Caribbean Universities Project for Integrated Distance Education (CUPIDE), in collaboration with the Distance Learning Secretariat of the Ministry of Science, Technology and Tertiary Education in Trinidad and Tobago. CUPIDE is a collaborative distance education project financed under the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO)/Japanese Funds-in-Trust for Capacity-building of Human Resources. The project is aimed at improving access to the services of five universities in the Dutch, French and English-speaking Caribbean through increased use of information and communication technologies. The participating institutions are The University of the West Indies (UWI), the University of Technology, Jamaica (UTech), the University Quisqueya (Haiti), the University of Suriname and the University of Guyana.