Jako Olivier is currently an Advisor: Higher Education at the Commonwealth of Learning (Vancouver, Canada). At this intergovernmental organisation, his main duties include supporting higher education institutions and governments in the Commonwealth in the development and implementation of policies and strategies related to open and distance learning, employability skills, authentic assessment, open educational resources, and micro-credentials. Here he is currently leading an international micro-credentials project entitled ‘Developing a Commonwealth Credit Transfer Framework: Micro-credentials in a digital age’.

Since 2021, he has also been an Adjunct Professor of Open Education at the University of Nova Gorica, Slovenia, where he is responsible for teaching two master’s-level courses on Open Education Design, as well as Effective Didactical Practices in Open Education.

From April 2019 to August 2022, he was a professor in Multimodal Learning at the North-West University (NWU), South Africa, where he led the UNESCO Chair on Multimodal Learning and Open Educational Resources (OER). He obtained his PhD in 2011, in which he researched the accommodation and promotion of multilingualism in schools through blended learning. Before he joined the NWU as a lecturer in 2010, he was involved in teaching information technology and languages in schools in the United Kingdom and in South Africa. From 2010 to 2015, he was a lecturer in the then Faculty of Arts of the NWU after being appointed as an associate professor in the Faculty of Education in 2015. During 2012, he was a guest lecturer at the University of Antwerp, Belgium. In 2018, he was promoted to full professor at the NWU.

Jako is a rated researcher from the South African National Research Foundation, and in 2018, he received the Emerging Researcher Medal from the Education Association of South Africa (EASA). His research is focused on open and distance learning, micro-credentials, open educational resources, self-directed learning, multimodal learning, microlearning, individualised and contextualised blended learning, e-learning in language classrooms and online multilingualism.

A recent output from the ‘Developing a Commonwealth Credit Transfer Framework: Micro-credentials in a digital age’ is the Towards a Micro-credential Framework for the Commonwealth report and Commonwealth Micro-credential Framework for Lifelong Learning.

This can be downloaded from: https://hdl.handle.net/11599/5742