OERu/Planning/2015 Institutional Action Plans/University of Southern Queensland

Executive Summary
USQ’s focus this year is to build a broader dialogue and resource activities in “openness,” with OERu serving as one of our cultural touchstones and commitments. As indicated below, we are working on a second course as well as developing “micro-courses” for the rest of “Regional Relations.” We also intend on closely aligning technical contributions to OERu with a more progressive direction at USQ.

There are a number of activities that we believe we can align with OERu, which do not appear formally in this document as commitments:


 * Asking teachers who are awarded funding to produce “open textbooks” if they would be willing to host a mixed (USQ/OERu) course.
 * Engaging much more actively in Openness professional development.
 * Potentially co-funding an OERF developer.
 * Involving additional USQ (Academic Division) staff on committees and perhaps special projects aligned with OERu mission and annual goals

In short, our focus is on building capacity for a culture (normal, patterns, and artefacts) of openness in which participation in OERu; other openness activities; and insistence on open processes, practices, and governance is a natural impulse and commitment.

2015 Objectives

 * Deliver micro-course in International Relations
 * Develop 3 micro-courses in International Relations
 * Develop 1 micro-course in Indigenous (topic name) in partnership with 3 other OERu institutions resulting in 1 full-course.
 * Demonstrate the potential of distributed virtual OER course development. (perhaps as a Topic in 23 Things About Openness)
 * Continued support for technology development.
 * Continued participation in the following OERu working groups: Strategic Planning; Technology; Course Approval and Quality; General Education 1st Year of Study.

OERu community source and technology innovation
0.2 Contribution to shared Open Source Technologist Postion

Other contributions in kind

 * Automated course creator (template). Python software which, runs natively on Linux operating systems, creates mobile-first, responsive-design web site (course) and takes parameters from an Excel spreadsheet (course-code, course-name, logo, and URLs). Demonstration videos and further information can be found on the wikieducator.org site < http://wikieducator.org/OERu/Planning/Technology_working_group/2014-07-11 >
 * Contributing to the installation and testing of software, systems, and in-house OERu software development as required, using MediaWiki, Wordpress, Amazon EC2, HTML/CSS Bootstrap, Javascript, PHP, MySQL, Python.