Professional Associations & Conferences

Most of these have comprehensive web sites with links to distance learning conference papers and proceedings, distance learning literature, and electronic forums. For speakers of English, the world body is ICDE (the International Council for Open and Distance Learning).

More useful, perhaps, is The Commonwealth of Learning (COL), which has a mandate from the 53 Commonwealth governments for sharing and leading open and distance education development (col.org). The COL web site is packed with distance learning information, resources and assistance.

Our national organisation is FLANZ, the Flexible Learning Association of New Zealand. FLANZ is committed to fostering growth, development, research and good practice in distance education, open learning and flexible delivery systems for education. FLANZ, like those listed above, mounts biennial conferences and hosts web conferences (FLANZ 'Conversations'). It also publishes the refereed, open access Journal of Open, Flexible and Distance Learning. The University of Otago is an affiliate member of FLANZ.

The next FLANZ conference will be held in Wellington in April 2020.