International Council for Open and Distance Education

ICDE was founded in 1938 in Canada as the International Council for Correspondence Education (ICCE). The first World Conference was held in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada the same year. The idea for holding an international conference came from J. W. Gibson, director of high school correspondence instruction for the province of British Columbia, who attended the National Conference on Supervised Correspondence Study in New York in 1936. Gibson shared with other delegates knowledge he had about correspondence education in several countries and then suggested that an international conference be held. Rex Haight, then chair of the New York conference, supported the idea and later served as president for the first conference.

At the second conference, held in 1948, the delegates voted unanimously to establish a more permanent international council.

The third conference took place in 1953 in Christchurch, New Zealand, where a committee presented a proposed "Constitution and Rules" for the council that was adopted by the delegates. These rules helped the council became more established and conferences began to follow a more regular schedule.

In 1969, the 8th World Conference was held at UNESCO Headquarters in Paris to celebrate the affiliation with UNESCO.

In 1982, during the 12th World Conference held in Vancouver, the organization changed its name to "the International Council for Open and Distance Education" (ICDE).^[3]

In 1988, during the 14th ICDE World Conference held in Oslo, the King of Norway, King Olav V, and the Norwegian Prime Minister, Gro Harlem Brundtland, both attended. This conference led to the establishment of the permamenent secretariat in Oslo.^[3]

Due to COVID-19 outbreak, in 2021 the conference organized its first-ever Global Virtual Conference Week in 2021.^[4]

ICDE is a membership organization with 10 different types of memberships: Individuals, Students, Associations, Colleges and Universities, Companies, Educational networks, Governmental organizations, Non-Governmental organizations, Secondary Schools.

Since 2000, the ICDE World Conference has been organized biannually and on a different continent each time. The conference is traditionally organized at the invitation of an ICDE member.

The first 10 years of the council the presidency was led by Rex Haight in Canada who was also the chair of the first ICCE World Conference held in Victoria in 1938.^[5] Since 1948 the presidency of the council has been limited to a maximum of 5 years.

ICDE regularly publishes or contributes to reports, surveys and articles on the following topics: Quality in Education; Online Education; Flexible Education; Elearning; Lifelong Learning; Higher Education; Distance Education; Open Education and OER (Open educational resources); Alternative Digital Credentials; Learning Analytics; Education Policies; Research and Innovation in Education; etc.

ICDE publishes the Open Praxis journal, a peer-reviewed open access scholarly journal focusing on research and innovation in open, distance and flexible education.^[7]