The Business Strategy

Broad Developmental Objective

The broad developmental objective of VUSSC is to develop the human resource capacity that small states of the Commonwealth require to ensure that they are able to participate effectively in global economies and thrive as equal members of the world community. It will do this by creating a collaborative network called the Virtual University for Small States of the Commonwealth that will support higher education institutions to provide learners with innovative, locally and globally relevant teaching and learning resources required to improve the quality of higher education in participating states.

Project Purpose

Within the above broad development objective, the purpose of VUSSC is to use collaborative networks of participants from small states of the Commonwealth to build high quality educational courses and programmes, comparable with the best of their kind from anywhere else in the world. It will also seek to provide support to participating states in order to ensure that appropriate policy frameworks, technological platforms, and human capacity are developed to facilitate effective participation in VUSSC’s activities, as well as the necessary institutional capability to harness the results of the initiative to the benefit of learners.

Guiding Principles

The following key principles have underpinned the creation of VUSSC’s business strategy:

1. The purpose of this business strategy is not to create a new institution with its own brand name, but to find ways to reinforce existing institutions and developments that are already taking place in small states. Thus, VUSSC will focus on strengthening existing post-secondary institutions in small states to combat the challenges outlined in the previous section.

2. With this in mind, VUSSC is committed to setting realistic targets for its collaborative course development processes, in order to ensure that high standards of quality are attained and that the resulting products are integrated into programmes offered by VUSSC institutions.

3. The focus will be on producing content that can be shared under a Creative Commons licence (see www.creativecommons.org for further information). Wherever possible, content will be shared under a Creative Commons by attribution, share-and-share-alike V2.5 (CC-BY-SA) licence.

4. All VUSSC initiatives will integrate structured capacity-building for any interested parties, in order to ensure that all participating states are provided opportunities to build their capacity to develop better quality educational programmes, using a full spectrum of media as appropriate. The nature of specific activities will be defined on a case-by-case basis.

The activities of the VUSSC consortium will be driven by its members, with coordination support from the Commonwealth of Learning.