A strategic planning model for developing open educational resources

Abstract

The Internet evolution has facilitated the concept of openness now more than ever. A number of current technologies support the paradigm of modern education in terms of creation, communication, and collaboration. Open educational resources (OERs) is an innovative approach to educational technology because it opens up opportunities to create, share, and facilitate learning and ethical practice by creating, using, and managing by offering a wider array of educational resources among a greater diversity of global learners. Its trends and movements have become more prominent as not only a phenomenon but as a way of improving the quality of education. OERs alone are not sustainable on their own dimension. There is a need of combining concepts from different inter-disciplinary areas for sustainable development. Strategic visionary and planning processes are a way to systematically plan the development of open education resources and practices for the future. Strategic planning processes are considered to be a tool and guideline for helping all levels of HEIs developing their strategic plan, and to find their competitive advantage and place within their environment. Thus, developing the strategic planning process model becomes an essential starting point. The research objectives of this study were (1) to develop a strategic planning process model for developing open educational resources (OERs) based on a concept of university of social responsibility (USR), and (2) to try out the proposed strategic planning process model at selected university at the department level. A drafted strategic planning process (SPP) model was verified from subject matter experts, survey, and focus group interviews. The results indicated that the purposed SPP model is exemplary and the output of OER strategic plan is exemplary as well. The proposed SPP model served as a toolkit for a sampling university formulating an OER strategic plan in the try out phase. As a result, the sampling university was chosen because of the indication of their current USR policy and educational technology practices. The field-test in the sampling university in the central part of Thailand was successfully formulated an OER strategic plan including OER vision, mission, values, goals, preliminary strategies, and an action plan to foster OER development that align with their current university key performance indicator (KPI) and also predicted some influential outcome as USR impacts in the future including: (1) educational impact in stakeholder awareness in values and in an understanding of the society that they are part of, (2) sub-social impact in faculty and staff training, and (3) ethic impact in code of ethic. The preliminary strategies include: (1) fostering open content usages and development, (2) developing a central management system for OERs with easy access to student, faculty, and academic staff, (3) creating open content sharing awareness, and (4) facilitating appropriate usage of open license. In addition, the SPP model enables university leaders to share the OER vision and belief with others in its continual concern with application and strategic plan implementation. The approach of envisioning the future is one way of creating a future that moves from vision to action and to reality.