Professor Gbolagade Adekanmbi

Professor Gbolagade Adekanmbi holds a Bachelor's degree in Adult Education and Language Arts (1985); a Master’s degree in Adult Education, with a specialisation in Industrial Education (1986); and a PhD in Adult Education, with a research focus on Distance Education (1992), all obtained from the University of Ibadan, in Nigeria. From 1987 to 1995, he taught courses in Adult Education, Distance Education, Industrial Education, and Community Development, among others, at the University of Ibadan. He later joined the Centre for Continuing Education (CCE), University of Botswana in 1995, where he coordinated for many years, the Commonwealth Diploma in Youth in Development Work; the Education component of the Diploma in Primary Education (DPE), a programme for upgrading Botswana teachers; the Certificate in Adult Education programme, and the Diploma in Adult Education programme, all run through the distance learning mode. In these roles, Professor Adekanmbi coordinated the design and development of course modules, developed many course modules, trained tutors and writers at various training programmes, and taught some of the courses.

He was a Kellogg Visiting Scholar at Syracuse University, USA, from February to March 1991 where he utilised the resources of the University’s George Arents Research Library for his PhD dissertation. Professor Adekanmbi was a co-winner of the UNESCO Literacy Mention in 1992, later published by the UNESCO Institute for Education (UIE) in Hamburg in 1998 as Literacy, Tradition and Progress: Enrolment and Retention in an African Rural Literacy Programme. From 2008 to 2011, he served as Deputy Director, Academic Programming at the CCE, and from 2009 to 2011, was the Centre’s Acting Director, overseeing all the Centre’s academic and outreach programmes. Between 2017 and 2018, he was an Adjunct Professor at Botho University in Gaborone, where he taught on the Master of Education in Higher Education programme, through blended learning. In 2022, he served as a Consultant for the Commonwealth of Learning (COL), in an online Open and Distance Learning (ODL) training programme organised for the Universidade de Pungue staff in Mozambique, under the auspices of the Southern African Development Community Centre for Distance Education (SADC-CDE).

Professor Adekanmbi has made scholarly presentations at international conferences and has over 60 publications to his credit. With research interests in adult, distance and higher education, Professor Adekanmbi is a Reviewer for the International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning (IRRODL), the Journal of Adult and Continuing Education (JACE), and the International Academic Forum (IAFOR) Journal of Education (Studies in Education). One of his major works ‘The State of Access in Open and Distance Learning in Sub-Saharan Africa’ was published in a book on Open Access by IGI Global in 2021.

Professor Adekanmbi is currently the Dean of the School of Education at the Botswana Open University, and the University’s Acting Deputy Vice Chancellor, Academic Services. He is also the Chair of the African Deans of Education Forum (ADEF).