The Maldives Minister of Education, Dr. Mustafa Lutfi, launched the country's mini-laptop programme with a class of third-grade students in August. Dr. Lutfi presented mini-laptops to the young students, saying that he has -œbeen dreaming about this event- since he was appointed Minister of Education in 2008. His hope is that all students in the third grade will be using mini-laptops for learning by 2011.

The mini-laptop, originally known as the Eduframe, was developed by COL's regional office, the Commonwealth Media Education Centre for Asia (CEMCA). In addition to enabling wider use of information and communication technology (ICT) in teaching and learning, the mini-laptops will also ease the heavy load of textbooks students have to carry because the books are pre-loaded on the laptops. This pilot research project in Maldives will assess the ICT
skills of the students, as well as the user friendliness of the Eduframe.

CEMCA led development of the Eduframe, which was originally a digital photo frame that carried educational content. It evolved into a low-cost laptop that is now marketed by M/S Orbit Peripherals Pte Ltd., Singapore as the Datamini Netbook and costs US$74. The Eduframe has a seven-inch screen and uses a 2 GB flash drive for storage. It runs on Windows CE and has 128 MB of memory, three USB ports, and a battery that lasts about two hours.

The COL further carefully prepared a toolkit as one way of providing support as open schools develop quality-assurance systems that will be the foundation of a culture of continual improvement in open schooling. The hope is that it will benefit open schooling by making institutions' quality-assurance practices as explicit and systematised as possible, with quality-assurance policies clearly communicated amongst institutional stakeholders.

While the toolkit aims at helping open schools to institute sound quality-assurance systems that can lead to quality ODL provisioning, it also seeks to alert policy makers to the importance of investing in quality open schooling as more and more learners opt for this alternative form of education.