The Future of Professional Development – USQ Mini-courses – update

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See previous article.

USQ UpSkill background

The University of Southern Queensland (USQ) has established UpSkill ‘Professional learning for the 21st Century’ – with practical online mini-courses. Currently, there are business, management, marketing and education courses, and more are being developed. USQ is a recognised leader in online and blended education and has established a reputation for quality online courses.

Each course involves approximately 40 hours over four weeks. When you successfully complete a course you receive a verifiable digital badge – these are certifications that can be used in email signatures, resumés, and on sites such as LinkedIn and Twitter.

Mini-courses are also a pathway to obtaining credit to USQ graduate programs, with four mini-courses are equivalent to a graduate course.

Transport and UpSkill

USQ published the first series of four transport planning mini-courses that I developed – now available for enrolment at https://upskill.usq.edu.au/courses:

  1. Strategy for Moving People
  2. Planning for Moving People
  3. Strategy for Moving Freight
  4. Planning for Moving Freight

These courses were run over four weeks starting:

  • 2 March 2020
  • 11 May 2020
  • 20 July 2020
  • 21 September 2020
  • 23 November 2020

To be eligible for a digital badge for these minicourses students need to successfully complete an assessment.

Each course has four topics, each with six phases of learning:

  1. You: Explore what you already know, challenge your perceptions, and activate prior knowledge and understandings.
  2. Discover: Familiarise yourself with key theories, concepts and ideas.
  3. Activate: Further explore or develop your understanding of key theories, concepts and ideas by applying what you’ve learned.
  4. Dive deep: Extend your learning and further develop your understanding of key theories, concepts and ideas through readings and videos that encourage you to think about different contexts, specific scenarios or related concepts.
  5. Practise: Translate what you’ve learned into your own professional context through activities that get you thinking about your own practice.
  6. Perform: Complete parts of your assessment – or tasks that will help you with your assessment – at the end of each topic to demonstrate your learning.