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Tony Mays

Canada

Dr Tony Mays is Director: Education at the Commonwealth of Learning (COL) in Vancouver, Canada. He also leads COL’s Open Schooling initiative and manages COL’s Journal of Learning for Development. He completed his undergraduate studies in the United Kingdom and then started his career as a secondary school teacher in Malawi, through a posting organised by the British charity Voluntary Service Overseas, in a school which supported both traditional full-time day scholars as well as non-traditional learners registered with the Malawi College of Distance Education.

His interest in teaching and learning through both contact and distance education methods, as well as combinations thereof, continued throughout his subsequent career which increasingly focused on teacher development through distance education and then also about distance education, in work with Promat Colleges, Saide, the University of Pretoria and the University of South Africa.

He is a former President of the National Association of Distance Education and Open Learning in South Africa (NADEOSA), former Honorary Treasurer of the Distance Education Association of Southern Africa (DEASA) and former chair of the biennial Distance Education and Teachers Training in Africa (DETA) conference. Tony holds a DEd in Curriculum Studies from the University of South Africa.

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