Focusing on the institutional pursuit of regional cooperation, Issue 19’s missive by Prof Dr Ahmad Izanee Awang, President/Vice Chancellor of Open University Malaysia (OUM), takes off from the recently-concluded meeting which saw OUM hosting the representatives of OU5, a collective of five Southeast Asian open universities, who convened in Kuala Lumpur in pursuit of collaborative research. The missive iterates yet again the action-backed importance that OUM places on building ties and synergising with its counterparts in Southeast Asia and beyond by way of amplifying their collective voice. The same sentiment on regionality as a method that works is echoed in this issue by the Chancellor of the University of the Philippines Open University (UPOU), Prof Melinda Bandalaria, who, in a conversational feature, also tackles a wide array of critical matters, including gendered leadership, universal design for learning (UDL), decolonising higher education, and the future of open, distance, and digital education (ODDE). On the future of ODDE, it is potentially gold, speculates Prof Datuk Dr Tajudin Md Ninggal, OUM’s Vice President (Academic & Research), in a separate feature in this issue – provided, he says, the universities that champion ODDE are able to firmly orientate towards their institutional true-north. ODDE in future may remain balkanised by language use as it is today, hence impeded in its glocalisation, as Prof Junhong Xiao argues in the guest feature. But it is more than likely to be revolutionised by artificial intelligence, posits AP Dr Nantha Kumar Subramaniam in his techno-optimistic feature.

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Dr David Lim, Editor