By Dr Tony Mays
Education Specialist: Open Schooling COL

In November 2023, COL will publish the final issue of the tenth volume of the Journal of Learning for Development (JL4D) — a forum for the publication of research with a focus on innovation in learning and its contribution to development.

As explained by Dr Sanjaya Mishra, the founding Associate Editor, it has three main characteristics:

• it showcases how learning for development works
• it focuses on innovation, with a special emphasis on, but not exclusively limited to, open and distance learning
• it provides a space for publications by both established and early career scholars.

In the last few years, some of the most engaged themes have been how OER can be leveraged to support technology-enabled learning; the concept of learning for development; and the innovative ways technology can be harnessed to address the needs of different contexts.

According to Dr Tony Mays, who currently manages the day-to-day work of the journal, the use of appropriate technology tailored for context is a recurring theme, but we need to keep thinking about the why (learning for development) and the how (technology- enabled) and keep evaluating what we are achieving (lessons of experience and research) in order to close the feedback loop into improved practice.

Professor Alan Tait was the founding Editor-in-Chief and stepped down from that role in 2016 (although remaining involved as Emeritus Editor thereafter).

Ms Anne Gaskell took over as Chief Editor from Volume No. 2 in July 2016, and her final editorial was in 2019.

Professor Santosh Panda became Chief Editor from the first issue of 2020. He has noted a growing emphasis on understanding better how technology-enabled learning can contribute to learning for development.

In 2022, COL updated to the latest version of the Open Journal System. It has been linked with ORCID (a persistent digital identifier), has registered with Scopus (in addition to several other databases with which the journal affiliates) and added permanent links for each article.

Since its inception, the Journal has received 1,053 submissions, 335 of these within 2023, and its most popular paper has been viewed some 158,374 times. It has an h-index of 30 and an i10-index of 76, with 3007 citations since 2018.

COL thanks our Chief Editors for their guidance, the authors for entrusting us with their publications and our growing list of reviewers for their support of the journal and its authors.

Contributions are invited for the Journal of Learning for Development, which focuses on innovations in learning — in particular, but not exclusively, open and distance learning and its role in development. Contributions can take the form of research articles, case studies, commentaries and reports from the field.

Please visit the journal’s website for more details and to submit work at www.jl4d.org