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The strategic plan and budget remain essential factors in the strength of most organizations. Organizations only have a finite amount of financial resources to deploy to continue to carry out their vision, mission, and goals, more commonly known as the strategic plan. The purpose of the budget is to funnel those financial resources to execute that mission. Many organizations experience a divergence between their budget and strategic plan. The literature is inundated with coverage on the budget and strategic plan yet mainly centers around them as entirely separate and distinct topics. This study examines the relationship between the budget and strategic plan, where it is critically important to have alignment, and how an individual’s perception of time factor into misalignment. To address this gap, I provide an in-depth case study of a large municipality. Organizations such as these often have tighter budgetary constraints, public service commitments, complicated public policy implications, and more legal restrictions than the private sector. Further, I explore how an exogenous shock, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, amplifies the budget and strategic plan's misalignment. I conducted a total of twenty-three semi-structured interviews with senior- and executive-level personnel. I supplemented the interviews with publicly available materials, strategic plans, proposed and adopted budgets, and website information. As a result, these findings offer a detailed empirical account of how the budget and strategic plan's relationship evolves over a fiscal year within a large government. Based on a broad analysis of this data, I also find that the budget and strategic plan relationship and the explanations for misalignment can be more complex and subtle than previously thought. Additionally, I provide exemplary lessons for practitioners to identify, manage and mitigate misalignments between the budget and strategic plan within their own organizations to maximize financial and non-financial performance outcomes. INDEX WORDS: Budget, Strategic Plan, COVID-19, Budget and Strategic Plan Relationship, Public Finance, Temporal Dimensions

This dissertation is about the changing imaginations of academic social work in an increasingly entangled world. Broadly, my subject area is the history and philosophy of social work, with an emphasis on engagements with critical social theory. More specifically, my research explores questions of discipline, generation, and critical social theory in the Anglophone Canadian context as a means to better understand how shared perceptions of the possible and the desirable are “situated knowledges” (Haraway, 1988). To do so, I trace and theorize changing perceptions through a survey of educators, and through integrative interdisciplinary and philosophical knowledge work considering various dynamics of disciplines in general and social work in particular. Evoking my own generational standpoint, I raise as a collective disciplinary problematic the canonization of second generation critical social theories, and the need to engage in the collective work of disciplinary reflexivity on, and accountability to, the ways in which the conditions of existence and possibility of critical academic social work are changing over time. Methodologically, I elaborate a reparative historical practice through a slightly different genre or style of writing. This is a feminist strategy, one roughly within the (generational) turn towards showing what one combines and assembles and learns through engaging with the world as a means to invite further speculative and imaginative work. This strategy is also a means to begin to imagine a “post-expert,” “post-good” and “post-progress” social work, not because knowledge and intention do not matter, but because these organizing referents have each achieved a level of saturation in what they can produce in the world. As such, this dissertation contributes some of the conditions of intelligibility necessary for the collective work of imagining and reimagining something akin to justice or improvement through social work after the fall of so many left and liberal progress narratives. Dissertation Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) This research explores changing understandings of how social work in the Canadian state context imagines and intervenes in the world. My focus is on academic social work as both educator and knowledge producer, because the university is where some ideas and practices are refined and reproduced so that they can in turn be shared more broadly. Findings include the noteworthy influence of the university on the ideas and initiatives that do gain traction, as well as a generational structural to perceptions of the possible and the desirable. Overall, this research contributes a range of resources—historical, theoretical, empirical and speculative—to the collective work of imagining and reimagining social work for a changing world.

This paper describes a number of ‘good ideas’ designed to assist staff who are involved in the management, delivery or support of student project work. The ideas were formed from a Disciplinary Commons. The good ideas discussed include online forums, a project repository, alternative project structures, project preparation, progress reviews, instant supervision, peer support and anti-cheating mechanisms. Readers are encouraged to dip in, consider the ideas and implement those of most use for their own institutions.

The availability of Web 2.0 tools together with associated Open Educational Resources (OER) enables the creation of new social and collaborative learning spaces. This paper investigates student preferences (across three cohorts) in terms of openly and freely accessible Web 2.0 tools to provide a space where students can interact with each other and their tutor to discuss concerns that arise within their final year project-based learning. This intervention was planned since existing arrangements that support communication between tutor and distance learning students appeared insufficient to facilitate the necessarily intense episodes of interaction required for productive supervision. The findings suggest that different student cohorts are interested in using a variety of Web 2.0 tools. This paper gives initial feedback about intended usage of Web 2.0 tools for co-operative and collaborative learning for final year project work.

The proliferation of Web 2.0 social networking tools enables the creation of new open teaching and learning spaces. However the adoption of open social networks to encourage collaborative work around Open Educational Resources (OER) is a more recent phenomenon. This paper investigates the use of an open social forum associated with OER to facilitate informal and formal online activity between learners and teachers. The two participants who are lecturers are familiar with the use of closed and password protected online environments. \ud \ud The developing role of the educator in open social networks is investigated through actual use of OER and open forums for informal learning and the lecturers’ attitudes towards use for formal learning are explored. The findings suggest that one lecturer wanted to consider using open environments for formal learning and one lecturer did not. Although the findings in the main are positive, there is a suggestion that facilitative techniques (both human and activity based) need to be further developed to support and sustain learning communication with OER and associated open forums. This paper gives initial feedback about expected and actual usage of OER and open forums for co-operative and collaborative learning.

The availability of Web 2.0 tools together with associated Open Educational Resources (OER) enables the creation of new collaborative online learning spaces. This paper discusses initial findings from the Higher Education Academy (HEA) Information and Computer Sciences (ICS) funded project: ‘Using Open Educational Resources and Web 2.0 Tools to support Ethical Reasoning in ICS Project-Based Learning’. The project started officially in December 2009 (students joined in February 2010) with the aim of investigating the potential of Web 2.0 tools and OER to support students engaged in final year project-based learning at the Open University. Capitalising on existing online environments and tools as well as available learning resources in the area of ethical reasoning in ICS, this project explores the potential of openly and freely accessible Web 2.0 tools to provide a space where students can interact with each other and their tutor to discuss concerns that arise within their project work including those related to ethical issues. This intervention was planned as existing arrangements that support communication between tutor and distance learning students (the course website, separate closed tutor group forums and email) appeared to be insufficient to facilitate the necessarily intense episodes of interaction required for productive supervision. This paper discusses students’ views of social networking tools and seeks to shed some light on which tools they would prefer to use for formal learning.

Recent advances in Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) enable educational and cultural institutions to rethink and experiment with their conduct of learning using digital social media and networking tools. Meanwhile, several well-known – yet distinct – initiatives within the OER world continue to purport a mission of education as a ‘public good’. In addition current thinking as well as emerging United Kingdom (UK) and international policy agendas on education are shifting from the idea of simply providing access to content, towards the notion of creating ‘open participatory learning ecosystems’ (cf. Smith and Casserly, 2006; Seely-Brown 2007; Seely-Brown & Adler 2008). At the core of these evolutionary trajectories of OER mediation, the notion of community and participation become more complex. Put simply, an OER community might consist of those who collaborate to create or reuse OER content. Alternatively a community may be formed by interactions between tutors and peers aggregating in the study and creative adaptation of particular OER units. Likewise, as the landscape of OER becomes more diversified (comprising of initiatives coming from both established educational institutions and from ‘alternative’ or informal social constellations of interest and practice), so does the configuration of social production of content in learning environments. The question then arises as to the appropriateness of community building tools or mediating artefacts that address different audiences’ inscriptions or goals to facilitate engagement. To address these questions we first chart definitions of, and affordances surrounding participation and community engagement in a diverse body of OER initiatives. Secondly, deploying Engeström’s framework on social production as a new landscape for learning (2007), we draw on a number of interviews with OER professionals and volunteers as well as on insights on learner behaviour to offer a mapping of learning situations across ‘informal’/’formal’ public spaces. We conclude by problematising the notion of collaborative communities or ‘relational networks’ within an OER context and by proposing a framework that takes into account a number of boundary issues concerning design of original and OER content (Wilson, 2007), and peer-production of content, including expertise, locus of agency and pedagogy (Conole et al., in press).

Much educational content sits within institutional systems protected from global access, this proprietary approach restricts opportunities for informal learning and the exchange of materials between cultures. One response to reducing this particular digital divide is to open up access to existing courses by providing them as free to use Open Educational Resources (OERs). This is being addressed through work on OpenLearn (the open content initiative from The Open University developed with support from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation) and POCKET (The Project on Open Content for Knowledge Exposition and Teaching, supported by JISC under the repositories and preservation programme).\ud The approach is evaluative considering transfer of lessons from work on the reworking of distance learning materials (within the OpenLearn initiative) to the reworking of material from campus-based universities (supported by the POCKET project). Analysis will include the role of supporting artifacts (guidelines, examples, tools) and the process support required (shared aims, workshops, structure). Evaluation tools that are being applied include logging of experience, stake holder interviews, and analytics data.\ud We are building on existing evaluation of the OpenLearn initiative that has revealed models for learner use of open educational resources and studied the reuse of released open resources. Results include the need for a range of reworkable formats, support and time pressures on voluntary use – these results are supported by case study information and overall usage statistics. Further data that will be available from POCKET by September 2008 will include reflections from participants, workshop outcomes and initial stakeholder interviews, full evaluation of POCKET will be complete by April 2009.\ud This paper will have examined our understanding of the process by which content can be transformed from existing learning materials to freely available open educational resources. Conclusions at this stage will focus on the process of adoption and transfer from OpenLearn and the effectiveness of the evaluation and project approach. Comparison will be made with the advantages and disadvantages of the self supported approach adopted initially in OpenLearn and suggestions given for structures that enable collaboration in producing open educational resources.

The number of Open Educational Resource Repositories available worldwide continues to grow and many contain course materials from campus-based institutions. The Open University in the United Kingdom (UK) has influenced the OER movement by releasing traditional distance learning course materials as OERs. This paper discusses issues associated with the transformation of Open University distance learning course materials in the IT and Computing subject area into OERs.

Open Educational Resources (OERs) are freely available and have been accessible globally, in a variety of forms, since September 2002 (Smith, and Casserly, 2006). The initial thrust of The MIT OpenCourseWare initiative in 2002 appeared to be aimed at those interested in a university level education. In the last five years a number of different Open Content schemes have followed the lead of MIT (John Hopkins School of Public Health, Connexions, Utah State, Wikiversity and others). The OER movement has encouraged the idea of shareable assets between individuals and organisations (Atkins, Seely Brown, and Hammond, 2007). The Open University in the United Kingdom (UK) has joined this field of enquiry with a new enterprise called OpenLearn (Open Content Initiative, 2006). This initiative is funded by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and was launched on 25th October 2006. ...\ud \ud The paper starts with an overview of OpenLearn within the OER context and the ethos behind OpenLearn. This is followed be a brief discussion of the interactive facilities, which are available on the twin websites: the LearningSpace and the LabSpace. The LearningSpace is aimed at learners and currently holds 3,406 study hours of material. The LabSpace is aimed mainly at educators and presently houses 5,194 study hours of material. The main part of the paper focuses on the potential benefits of OpenLearn for seniors. The discussion is based on research undertaken with a later-life learning organisation for older people. The organisation has almost 200,000 members and has a global reach.

The aim of the research discussed in this paper is to investigate what changes are required to internal procedures within organisations (institutions and other bodies (those not associated with educational establishments)) to enable them to adopt these standalone OERs as part of their curriculum and assessment strategy.

Open Educational Resources (OERs) are freely available worldwide. Though sustainability (Downes, 2006) and production issues (Ferreira and Heap, 2006) have been discussed, more research is needed into how adopting OERs impacts on organisations. This paper will first report on how academics and teachers in ten institutions/organisations based nationally and internationally plan to use OERs with learners. Indeed, academics, teachers and facilitators are being encouraged to provide a wide variety of learning situations and experiences for the changing student population. The later discussion focuses on issues and possible changes required to internal procedures within organisations when OERs are adopted.

The number of Open Educational Resource Repositories available worldwide continues to grow and many contain course materials from campus-based institutions. The Open University in the United Kingdom (UK) has influenced the OER movement by releasing traditional distance learning course materials as OERs. This paper discusses issues associated with the transformation of Open University distance learning course materials in the IT and Computing subject area into OERs.