Wayne Mackintosh

Hi everyone,

I appreciate the calibre of contributions in helping the OERu to develop its strategic plan during this SCoPE seminar. Yesterday the OERu Strategic Planning working group convened to review progress on our open consultation. (Report of the meeting is posted here.)  Of interest, since posting the strategic planning pages in the wiki, we have recorded +3,700 page views, so folk are reading the documentation.

We are in a good position to commence the drafting of the OERu strategic plan for the OERu November series of meetings leading to the final approval by the OER Foundation. 

We would appreciate your thoughts and advice on developing a compelling vision and mission statement for the OERu strategic plan.

To provide context, the OERu is a flagship initiative of the OER Foundation (OERF) which is an independent charitable organisation. The vision of the OERF is to foster and support the development of sustainable ecosystems for open education worldwide. We do this by supporting educators and educational institutions in achieving their strategic objectives using open education approaches. 

Look forward to reading and implementing your recommendations.

Hi Dave,

I like it! I think OERu should follow the lead of BCcampus here. 

I particularly like the model of combining the annual report with refreshing of the strategic plan.

This will also slot in rather well with the financial and planning schedule of the OER Foundation with our international OERu meetings. The OERF has a December year end and the OERF meetings are usually scheduled around November. This would enable us to discuss the annual report and refreshed strategic plan during the international partners meeting and Council of CEOs meeting in time for approval by the OERF Board of Directors at their December meeting.

We'll trial this during the 2014 series of meetings. 

Thanks Jim,

That's valuable advice. We have seen that establishing concrete priorities for 2014 combined with our Working Group structure and OERu Management Committee has contributed to impressive progress for OERu this year. The conveners are doing a sterling job in moving things forward.

We'll build in operational targets for 2015 & 2016 in the documentation leading to the attainment of the 2017 projections.

Absolutely - incremental design is a key strength of the OERu model which keeps us agile and responsive.

W

Hi Marc,

Thanks for getting back to us - I appreciate that.

That's a clever way to use Google Sites to provide a navigation shell for a collection of course documents to provide a more attractive and polished way of looking at the course.

The OERu course snapshot is not that far removed from the approach you are using. In stead of documents we use individual wiki pages (which can be downloaded in open document format or pdf.)  The course snapshot provides the navigation, look and feel with the advantages of a CSS framework for responsive design.  We have the added advantage of a detailed edit history for collborative / distributed authoring and the ability to target specific instances for the snapshot. The wiki also provides a good way to manage the metadata of openly licensed images.   

Yes, with access to the Word documents we will be able to automate getting a draft into the wiki.  We will need to have a think about images, in particular the metadata for openly licensed images embedded in the course resources.

Correct, when the Unisa course was first nominated, we were not thinking about micro-courses. But that's my point - if the OER development was conducted openly -- we would have had the opportunity to discuss the pros and cons of a micro-format and potentially have avoided duplication of effort ;-).

No worries - design is an iterative process and we are all learning with each new iteration of the OERu courseware.

Looking forward to seeing the open version of the Critical Reasoning course. This will be a major edition to the OERu collection.

Thanks Mark,

I'd appreciate that -- Feel free to invite your tech person to respond in this forum.