The Partnership for Enhanced and Blended Learning (PEBL) project is funded by the Department for International Development (DFID) of the United Kingdom (UK) under the Strategic Partnerships for Higher Education Innovation and Reform (SPHEIR) initiative. SPHEIR focuses on creating new and innovative solutions to key higher education challenges to deliver systemic and sustainable change at scale.

The PEBL project is being led by the Association of Commonwealth Universities (ACU) and has three partners, including the Commonwealth of Learning (COL), Staff and Educational Development Association (SEDA) and the University of Edinburgh.

The project seeks to enhance teaching quality, student outcomes, employability and research output by addressing the critical academic staff shortages faced in many east African universities.

COL is responsible to develop and strengthen, amongst others, the university quality assurance systems within the partner and participating universities to robustly assure the quality of blended learning courses. In this context, a workshop on QA for Blended learning has been conducted in Nairobi in April 2018, with six partners and 18 participating Universities form Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania and Uganda. In April 2019, an online course on Quality Assurance in Blended Learning was further launched on COL’s Higher Education Moodle platform.