OEGlobal 2026: Full Schedule

All sessions are available online except round tables and special activities.

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11:50am EDT

Creatón STEM+: A Methodological Model for Teacher-Led, Territory-Based OER Co-Creation in Latin America

Wednesday October 7, 2026 11:50am - 12:20pm EDT

ID: 33734

Across open education initiatives, a persistent challenge remains: while access to Open Educational Resources (OER) has expanded, there is still a lack of contextualized, culturally relevant content, particularly in basic education contexts. At the same time, teachers are often positioned as users or adapters of resources rather than as authors of open knowledge.

The Creatón STEM+ methodological model addresses this gap by providing a structured Open Educational Practice that enables teachers to collaboratively design, prototype and publish OER grounded in local realities. Developed and implemented across Colombia, Chile and Uruguay, the model responds to the need for cross-regional approaches to open education that are rooted in the Global South and in school-level educational contexts. Its implementation across these contexts enabled the model to be tested and analysed in diverse educational settings.

The model integrates three key components:

(1) a preparatory phase focused on principles of open education, inclusion, the STEM+ educational approach and the ethical use of technologies in OER creation;

(2) an intensive co-creation Creatón based on a pedagogically adapted Design Thinking process; and

(3) a post-Creatón phase that supports validation, refinement and publication of OER. Central to the model is the positioning of teachers as creators of situated pedagogical knowledge, working collaboratively on real socio-educational challenges from their territories.

Findings from the analysis of the implementation process reveal key dimensions that shape the functioning of the model. The analysis highlights the centrality of collaborative work, pedagogical mediation and situated reflection in co-creation processes, as well as the need to structure learning beyond the intensive co-creation phase. At the same time, results show shifts in teachers’ understanding of STEM+, inclusion and open education, together with a significant increase in the perceived legitimacy of OER as a professional practice. Taken together, these findings suggest that the Creatón STEM+ methodological model not only has the potential to support the production of contextually relevant OER, but also contributes to repositioning open educational practices within teachers’ professional identity and everyday pedagogical work.

This presentation will examine the methodological architecture of the Creatón STEM+ model, its core pedagogical principles and its implementation across diverse educational contexts in Latin America. It will also discuss how cross-regional collaboration can strengthen the development of contextualized open content and contribute to more equitable and sustainable open education ecosystems.

The Creatón model offers a transferable framework for moving open education beyond access toward collective, teacher-led knowledge production in basic education, particularly in contexts where contextual relevance, inclusion and teacher agency are critical.

Speakers

Nina Ibaceta Guerra

Researcher & Project Coordinator, CIDSTEM Institute at Pontifícia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso

Nina Ibaceta Guerra is a biologist and science educator with a PhD in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology from the University of Chile. She is a researcher and project coordinator at the Center for Research in Science Education and STEM Education (CIDSTEM) at the Pontificia Universidad... Read More →

Anna Vater

Senior Project Manager, Siemens Stiftung

Anna Vater holds a B.A. in International Cultural and Business Studies from the University of Passau and an M.A. in Intercultural Cooperation and Communication from Munich University of Applied Sciences. She works as a Senior Project Manager at Siemens Stiftung, focusing on international... Read More →

Wednesday October 7, 2026 11:50am - 12:20pm EDT
6 - Dining Room 4 - 6th Floor MIT Samberg Conference Center, 50 Memorial Drive, Cambridge MA 02139 USA

Presentation

Speaker Modality In-person
Track Catalyzing Human Connection Creativity and Curiosity to Thrive

11:50am EDT

Empowering People with Disabilities About Open Educational Resources- Bridging the Educational Gaps with Inclusive, Accessible and Innovative Practices

Wednesday October 7, 2026 11:50am - 12:20pm EDT

2 - Salon M - 7th Floor

ID: 30909

An estimated 1.3 billion people in the world experience some form of disability (WHO 2023). People with disabilities in many parts of the world face considerable institutional and attitudinal barriers to access education, health care, and employment, which means they are at a higher risk of poverty, inequalities, and discrimination (Asian Development Bank 2022; Department for International Development 2000; 2022; United Nations 2018; 2024; WHO, 2022; 2023).

Education is a fundamental right for everyone, but individuals with disabilities face significant challenges in accessing education. The crushing reality of higher expenses of learning resources, lack of availability of inclusive and accessible resources, financial barriers, educational inequality and discrimination, and above all, limited networking opportunities deters individuals with disabilities from becoming active contributors of knowledge.

The development of Open Educational Resources (OER) accelerates innovation, but not necessarily for individuals with disabilities. The available open platforms and resources are scarce and do not meet the academic needs of individuals with diverse disabilities. Furthermore, it is assumed that individuals with disabilities lack participation in developing academic and non-academic open resources due to a lack of OER awareness and limited collaborative opportunities with individuals without disabilities. Previous studies are unavailable that highlight the academic and technological challenges faced by individuals with and without disabilities and how OER can support and enhance their creativity. As a neurodivergent open education expert, I hold that unless we create opportunities for individuals with and without disabilities to collaborate, true inclusion, innovation, and equitable knowledge creation will remain unattainable.

This case study on empowerment and collaboration among people with and without disabilities aims to highlight their educational and technological challenges, provide them with online training on OER, and, as an outcome, develop a collective book on OER. A total of 10 individuals with neurodivergent, sensory, and physical disabilities, mainly from Asia and Europe, were selected. These participants were either working or studying at the university level. Another group of participants included 10 professors and academics. All participants were selected via the Global Forum for Teacher Educators—a virtual forum of teachers, educators, and individuals from over 75 countries. Initially, a form was circulated and individuals who showed interest were contacted. The project started in February 2025 and ended in January 2026.

In the first phase, online panel discussions were organized to identify the educational and technological challenges faced by individuals with and without disabilities. In the next phase, eight hours of accessible synchronous and asynchronous training on OER were offered, incorporating hands-on collaborative activities. As a final output, interested participants wrote chapters on diverse topics, which were then published as OER in accessible formats. Collaboration in the project was ensured through inclusive team formation, joint writing activities, peer feedback, shared online platforms, and continuous dialogue between participants with and without disabilities, enabling meaningful co-creation of knowledge.

At the end of the project, a focus group discussion was organized, during which participants highlighted that OER had enhanced their creativity and enabled them to share their ideas and viewpoints with a global audience. It helped develop understanding, empathy, creativity, and awareness of each other's learning needs. It also encouraged them to continue their creative work beyond the book project by using and producing OER on topics of their interest with others.

This project highlights the significance of empowering people with and without disabilities about OER and promoting inclusive knowledge creation through collaboration and shared learning. By catalyzing human connection and creativity, it demonstrates how accessible open education initiatives can bring diverse voices together to co-create knowledge and inspire innovative ideas that benefit global learning communities.

Speakers

Munir Moosa Sewani

Global Education Expert, WID

Dr. Munir is an independent researcher, open education expert, disability advocate, and educational theorist. He holds a PhD in Education. He has published seven open books, both as a writer and editor. He has also completed the Charles Wallace Fellowship and the Global Heumann Fellowship... Read More →

Wednesday October 7, 2026 11:50am - 12:20pm EDT
2 - Salon M - 7th Floor MIT Samberg Conference Center, 50 Memorial Drive, Cambridge MA 02139 USA

Presentation

Speaker Modality In-person
Track Catalyzing Human Connection Creativity and Curiosity to Thrive

11:50am EDT

Procedural Planning Decision-Making in Open Education Practices

Wednesday October 7, 2026 11:50am - 12:20pm EDT

4 - Salon T - 7th Floor

ID: 31121

Open Educational Resources (OER) have gained widespread recognition as a strategy to reduce the financial burden of learning materials and expand access to education. Over the past decade, institutions around the world have increasingly adopted open resources to improve affordability and remove barriers to learning. As the open education movement continues to evolve, the conversation is shifting beyond the adoption of OER toward the broader implementation of Open Education Practices (OEP). While the benefits of OER are well documented—particularly in relation to cost savings and student access—less attention has been given to the institutional planning processes and leadership decisions that make these initiatives sustainable over time.

This session examines how procedural planning and institutional decision-making shape the development and growth of open education initiatives. Rather than focusing solely on outcomes such as cost savings or adoption rates, the presentation highlights the strategic planning frameworks, collaborative partnerships, and implementation strategies that support long-term OEP adoption. Institutional leaders, librarians, instructional designers, and faculty members often play interconnected roles in advancing open initiatives, and their collaboration is essential to building sustainable ecosystems that support open teaching and learning.

Using the experience of Kean University as a case study, this session will illustrate how institutional leadership, libraries, faculty partners, and student success teams worked together to expand open education initiatives across the institution. In 2019, only seven course sections used materials that did not require students to purchase textbooks. By Fall 2024, approximately 33% of course sections no longer required students to purchase textbooks. This significant growth was the result of intentional planning, cross-campus collaboration, faculty development programs, and the creation of institutional infrastructure such as repository systems and technological platforms that support open scholarship and knowledge sharing.

The session will also discuss key implementation considerations that institutions must address when expanding OEP. These include building faculty capacity through professional development, strengthening copyright and licensing literacy, and establishing policies that address student consent and privacy when learner-generated content is shared publicly. Participants will gain practical insights into how institutions can align open education initiatives with broader strategic priorities such as affordability, student success, equity, and academic innovation.

Through discussion and reflection, attendees will explore how intentional planning, institutional leadership, and collaborative partnerships can support the long-term sustainability and impact of Open Education Practices.

Speakers

Muhammad Hassan

Associate Vice President and Chief Librarian, Kean University

Dr. Muhammad Hassan is Associate Vice President and Chief Librarian at Kean University, where he leads the Nancy Thompson Learning Commons. A scholar-practitioner in educational leadership, his work centers on advancing equity, academic excellence, and social mobility through integrated... Read More →

Wednesday October 7, 2026 11:50am - 12:20pm EDT
4 - Salon T - 7th Floor MIT Samberg Conference Center, 50 Memorial Drive, Cambridge MA 02139 USA

Presentation

Speaker Modality In-person
Track Innovating Open Content to Democratize Knowledge

11:50am EDT

You Opened the Knowledge. The Institution Didn’t Open with It

Wednesday October 7, 2026 11:50am - 12:20pm EDT

5 - Dining Room 3 - 6th Floor

ID: 33478

The open education movement has pulled off something remarkable. Over the past two decades, practitioners, advocates, and policymakers have steadily chipped away at barriers to knowledge. Open courseware, open textbooks, open pedagogy, and flexible licensing have made high quality learning materials available at a scale that would have been hard to imagine a generation ago. The supply side question, how do we make knowledge available, has largely been answered. The demand side has not.

Across education systems, institutions that now have access to these resources are still producing the same outcomes they were before. The materials changed. The institutions did not. In the United States, the federal government poured $190 billion into pandemic recovery between 2020 and 2024, flooding schools with resources at an unprecedented scale. The 2024 NAEP results showed no real improvement. Forty percent of fourth graders scored below basic in reading. For economically disadvantaged students, it was over fifty percent. The resources showed up. The outcomes stayed the same.

This session makes a simple argument. The gap between access and impact is not mainly about resource quality, discoverability, or even adoption support, though all of those matter. It is about institutional behavior. Schools and systems are not neutral pipelines that turn inputs into outcomes. They are organizations with habits, incentives, and self-protective routines. New resources, including open ones, get absorbed into those routines long before they reach students. They get used for compliance, reporting, initiative churn, or narrative maintenance. The system consumes the resource. The student experience does not change.

In my own practitioner research, I call this load bearing dysfunction. These are problems that survive every attempt to fix them because they are quietly doing something the system depends on. When a school’s inability to implement a new resource helps preserve existing roles, workflows, or power structures, that “failure” is not really a failure. It is a feature.

The open education field has invested deeply in creating and spreading resources. It has invested far less in understanding the systems those resources land in. This session introduces a diagnostic framework drawn from fifteen years working inside schools and districts, along with insights from organizational theory and systems thinking. It is built around a different starting question. Not how do we get this resource into the system, but what is the system protecting that will keep this resource from ever reaching students?

This is not an argument against open education. It is an argument for widening its theory of change. Opening access is necessary, but it is not enough. If the institution stays closed, access does not translate into impact. The next phase of this work is not just better content. It is learning how to see and work with the systems themselves.

Speakers

Calvin Johnson

Leadership Consultant, Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education / Statewide System of Support

Calvin Johnson has spent fifteen years building and studying the internal architecture of schools and school systems. As Head of School at a charter school in Springfield, Massachusetts, he led a turnaround that removed three state-imposed conditions, produced grade-level literacy... Read More →

Wednesday October 7, 2026 11:50am - 12:20pm EDT
5 - Dining Room 3 - 6th Floor MIT Samberg Conference Center, 50 Memorial Drive, Cambridge MA 02139 USA

Presentation

Speaker Modality In-person
Track Hacking the Open Ecosystem and Praxis for the Public Good

12:25pm EDT

Silences in the Literature: Reimagining Qualitative Methods in Open Education Research to Disrupt Epistemic Hierarchies

Wednesday October 7, 2026 12:25pm - 12:55pm EDT

2 - Salon M - 7th Floor

ID: 31007

Open education research has expanded rapidly alongside the global growth of open educational resources (OER), open pedagogy, and open knowledge practices. While the field has made intentional movement towards foregrounding its research in social justice, the methods used to collect and examine data in open education often continue to reproduce dominant epistemological frameworks that privilege Western, institutional, and positivist approaches to knowledge production. Making assumptions that “there must be gaps in the literature” when certain knowledge is not published in a peer-reviewed journal is just one example of epistemological hierarchies we’ll identify as an opportunity to dismantle with new qualitative approaches.

Our session will engage the audience in exploring the idea that open education research would benefit from moving beyond inherited traditional methodological “norms” and instead consider the role that critical frameworks (e.g. Black Feminist, Critical Race Theory, Queer Theory, Poststructuralism, Postcolonial Theory, etc.) and concepts like reflexivity, positionality, and relationality could play in democratizing the research process to intentionally uplift historically marginalized ways of knowing.

This session proposes a critical reimagining of qualitative research protocols in open education in order to better align research practices with transformative values like equity, student agency, power distribution, and the democratization of knowledge that the open movement champions.

Attendees will be invited to critically examine how traditional qualitative protocols like the literature review, interview design, consent processes, data ownership, and authorship conventions have a tendency to reinforce epistemic hierarchies.

The session will present practical strategies for researchers seeking to shift toward more inclusive and ethically grounded approaches, but it will also create space for participants to come together and brainstorm what it might look like, for example, to center open and participant-controlled data practices as well as reflexive transparency concerning positionality and power in the research process.

Speakers

Jasmine Roberts-Crews

Lecturer, Ohio State University

Dr. Jasmine Roberts-Crews is an educator, speaker, writer, and scholar advocate.She earned her bachelor's degree in communication studies and Spanish at the University of Michigan, her master's degree in communication at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and doctorate... Read More →

Lindsey Gwozdz

Assistant Dean of Libraries, Community College of Rhode Island

Lindsey Gwozdz joined CCRI in 2024 as the Assistant Dean of the Library, having spent 11 years prior as an Associate Professor and the Scholarly Communications Librarian at Roger Williams University. She also serves as the Fellow for Open Education at the New England Board of Higher... Read More →

Wednesday October 7, 2026 12:25pm - 12:55pm EDT
2 - Salon M - 7th Floor MIT Samberg Conference Center, 50 Memorial Drive, Cambridge MA 02139 USA

Presentation

Speaker Modality Hybrid
Track Innovating Open Content to Democratize Knowledge

12:25pm EDT

Sweden Continues the Business: Reuse and International Collaboration for a New National Platform for OER

Wednesday October 7, 2026 12:25pm - 12:55pm EDT

6 - Dining Room 4 - 6th Floor

ID: 33866

Open Educational Resources (OER) have long been promoted as a key mechanism for widening access to knowledge and strengthening education as a public good. Yet, in many national contexts, OER adoption has remained fragmented, dependent on local initiatives, individual champions, or short-term projects. In Sweden, this situation is now undergoing a significant transformation: OER are increasingly recognized as a shared national responsibility—“everybody’s business”—supported by emerging infrastructure, policy alignment, and cross-institutional collaboration (Pareigis, 2024).

This session presents the development of Sweden’s new national platform for OER discovery and reuse, marking a shift from isolated institutional efforts toward a coordinated ecosystem. Central to this initiative is the implementation of a national aggregation service built on OERSI (Open Educational Resources Search Index), an open-source infrastructure designed to federate metadata across repositories and enable scalable, interoperable OER discovery (Klinger et al., 2023). By building on OERSI, Sweden aligns its national approach with international standards and practices, while leveraging an existing, community-driven technological framework—an approach previously explored in earlier OEGlobal sessions on federated OER infrastructures.

The session will outline the strategic, technical, and organizational dimensions of establishing this national platform. It will address key questions such as: How can national infrastructures support local OER practices without centralizing control? How can serendipity (Busch, 2024) be fostered and which role did it play in the implementation of the platform? How can interoperability and metadata quality be achieved across diverse institutional repositories?

Participants will gain insight into how Sweden’s higher education sector has mobilized around shared goals, including policy developments, national coordination mechanisms, and collaborative workflows for metadata aggregation and quality assurance.

Positioned within the broader theme of OEGlobal 2026—“innovating open practices to uphold knowledge as a public good” —this session highlights how national infrastructures can serve as catalysts for systemic change. It demonstrates how open technologies like OERSI can enable not only technical interoperability but also cultural shifts toward openness, shared ownership, and long-term sustainability of OER.

Key takeaways for participants include: (1) a practical understanding of how to design and implement a national OER platform using federated, open-source technologies; (2) lessons learned from cross-institutional collaboration and governance in a national context; and (3) insights into how aligning policy, infrastructure, and community engagement can accelerate OER adoption at scale. The session will be relevant for policymakers, library and IT leaders, open education practitioners, and researchers seeking to move from project-based OER initiatives to sustainable, system-level integration.

By sharing Sweden’s experience, this session contributes to the global conversation on how to build resilient OER ecosystems—demonstrating that when supported by shared infrastructure and collective commitment, OER can truly become a public good.

Speakers

Jörg Pareigis

Director of Library, Karlstad University, Sweden

Director of Library including the Centre for Teaching and Learning at Karlstad University, Sweden. Open education advocate and co-organizer of Open Networked Learning www.opennetworkedlearning.se.

Axel Klinger

Chief Technology Officer, Technische Informationsbibliothek (TIB)

Axel Klinger is Chief Technology Officer at Technische Informationsbibliothek (TIB) where he leads the development of innovative software products and service offerings and develops and implements technology strategies for TIB digital services with focus on Open Science, Open Education... Read More →

Wednesday October 7, 2026 12:25pm - 12:55pm EDT
6 - Dining Room 4 - 6th Floor MIT Samberg Conference Center, 50 Memorial Drive, Cambridge MA 02139 USA

Presentation

Speaker Modality Online
Track Hacking the Open Ecosystem and Praxis for the Public Good

12:25pm EDT

The Impact of Open Textbooks in Taiwan: A Personal and Institutional Journey

Wednesday October 7, 2026 12:25pm - 12:55pm EDT

4 - Salon T - 7th Floor

ID: 31961

The increasing cost of commercial textbooks, combined with rapidly changing student learning behaviors and widespread access to unauthorized digital materials, has created an urgent need to rethink how learning resources are developed and delivered in higher education. In Taiwan, these challenges have driven a national and institutional shift toward Open Textbooks (OTB) as a more equitable, flexible, and sustainable solution.

This session will present a comprehensive overview of how Taiwan has advanced Open Textbook adoption through a combination of policy support and grassroots engagement. The movement was influenced by international open education advocacy, notably the 2018 lecture tour in Taiwan by James Glapa-Grossklag, which introduced practical models from the California Community Colleges system. Building on this foundation, the Taiwan Open Course and Education Consortium launched national initiatives (2019–2021; 2022–2024), further supported by the Ministry of Education’s Second Phase of the e-Learning Movement Project (2022–2025), involving 37 universities in promoting OTB adoption.

At the institutional level, this session will highlight the implementation of Open Textbook initiatives at National Taipei University of Technology since 2021. These include structured programs for course adoption and collaborative OTB co-creation. To date, 46 faculty members have adopted 64 open textbooks across their courses, and 51 book reviews have been published to support wider dissemination and faculty engagement. In addition, two active communities are currently co-developing new open textbooks tailored to local educational contexts.

Beyond presenting these initiatives, this session will offer a multi-perspective reflection on OTB adoption, incorporating insights from students, faculty, and administrators. It will explore how open textbooks enhance accessibility, support real-time content updates, and enable innovative teaching practices. The session will also address common challenges, including faculty readiness, sustainability, and quality assurance.

Participants will gain practical strategies for initiating or scaling Open Textbook initiatives within their own institutions. The session is particularly relevant for educators, administrators, and policymakers interested in open education, digital learning, and equitable access to knowledge. By combining evidence-based outcomes with lived experiences, this session aims to provide transferable insights that support the global movement to democratize education through open content.

Speakers

Ta-Wei Li

Assistant Professor, National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University

Ta-Wei Li is an Assistant Professor of Applied Chemistry at National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University and served as Director of the Open Education Office from 2014 to 2021. From 2017 to 2021, he led the Taiwan Open Courseware and Educational Consortium (TOCEC) as President, helping... Read More →

Yu-Lun Huang

Associate Professor and Associate Dean for Academic Affairs, National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University

Yu-Lun Huang received the B.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science and Information Engineering from National Chiao Tung University, Taiwan, in 1995 and 2001, respectively. She has been a member of Phi Tau Phi Society since 1995. She is now an associate professor in the Department... Read More →

Jicheng Sun

Project Manager, National Taipei University of Technology

Mr. Jicheng Sun is a Project Manager in the Office of Academic Affairs at National Taipei University of Technology (NTUT), Taiwan. His work focuses on promoting innovative teaching and digital learning initiatives across the university. He oversees multiple institutional projects... Read More →

Wednesday October 7, 2026 12:25pm - 12:55pm EDT
4 - Salon T - 7th Floor MIT Samberg Conference Center, 50 Memorial Drive, Cambridge MA 02139 USA

Presentation

Speaker Modality Hybrid
Track Innovating Open Content to Democratize Knowledge

12:25pm EDT

Un-Grading Open: What Happens When Students Own the Outcome

Wednesday October 7, 2026 12:25pm - 12:55pm EDT

5 - Dining Room 3 - 6th Floor

ID: 33553

What happens when students are no longer working toward a grade, but toward creating something meaningful, public, and lasting? This session explores the transformative potential of “ungrading” within open education, where students are invited to create, adapt, and contribute to Open Educational Resources (OER) without the constraints of traditional grading systems.

Drawing on my experience supervising student-led OER projects in an Open Education Lab, this session examines what shifts when students are given ownership over both the learning process and the final product. Ungrading challenges conventional assumptions about motivation, accountability, and quality. While grades often serve as external motivators, removing them can create space for intrinsic motivation, creativity, and deeper engagement. But, it also introduces uncertainty for both students and instructors.

Through real examples, I will share what this approach looks like in practice: projects that thrived under ungrading, as well as those that struggled. These experiences surface how students navigate autonomy, how collaboration evolves without competitive grading structures, and how instructors can support quality and rigor without relying on numeric evaluation. The session will highlight both the possibilities and the complexities of this approach, offering an honest reflection on what worked, what didn’t, and why.

Participants will be invited to reflect on their own experiences with assessment and consider how autonomy influences engagement and learning. A short interactive activity will encourage attendees to think about how ungrading principles could be applied in their own teaching or institutional contexts, whether through small-scale experimentation or broader redesign.

This session will also provide practical strategies for implementing ungrading in open education contexts. Key takeaways include how to design structured flexibility through milestones and feedback loops, how to support students in navigating ambiguity, and how to balance freedom with accountability. Attendees will also explore how OER creation can shift the focus from disposable assignments to authentic, impactful work that extends beyond the classroom.

By centering student ownership and redefining success beyond grades, ungrading invites educators to rethink the purpose of assessment in open education. This approach not only supports creativity and curiosity but also positions students as active contributors to knowledge, rather than passive recipients.

Participants will leave with a deeper understanding of the pedagogical implications of ungrading, as well as actionable ideas for integrating student-driven, open practices into their own work.

Speakers

Pranjal Saloni

Open Education Lab Supervisor, Ontario Tech University

I manage the Open Education Lab at Ontario Tech University, where I oversee student-driven projects that advance open educational practices and the creation of open resources. With a Bachelor’s degree in Software Engineering and Management, I bring an interdisciplinary perspective... Read More →

Wednesday October 7, 2026 12:25pm - 12:55pm EDT
5 - Dining Room 3 - 6th Floor MIT Samberg Conference Center, 50 Memorial Drive, Cambridge MA 02139 USA

Presentation

Speaker Modality Online
Track Catalyzing Human Connection Creativity and Curiosity to Thrive

1:40pm EDT

Congratulations Open Education! So What Will You Do After Graduation?

Wednesday October 7, 2026 1:40pm - 2:10pm EDT

6 - Dining Room 4 - 6th Floor

ID: 33754

Imagine open education as a wonderful being that we’ve brought into the world, guided and worried about and celebrated as it’s grown up. What might be possible if open education graduates from school and now makes its way into the wider world? How does it carry forward and build upon the lessons learned, inspirations gained, relationships grown through its nurturing time in school?

Through many years of innovations, explorations, and collaborative commitments, the open education movement has established a solid footing in school-based learning, especially as a means to increase educational equity through student cost savings and more inclusive pedagogies. It’s clearly earned a spot on the Honor Roll.

Alongside this foundation in academic settings, we can glimpse at dramatically expanded impact for open education in the more fluid and expansive realms of lifelong learning. What we’ve learned about creating, adapting, and using open educational resources can be enabling values for more effective, engaging and inclusive lifelong learning that reaches beyond the traditional confines of schools.

In this session, we’ll look across the threshold beyond academic settings, into where open education is already meeting people where they are in informal knowledge spaces. We’ll consider how lifelong learning is evolving in social media and YouTube, Wikipedia, journalism, and community organizations.

We’ll highlight some of the promising ways that open education is already showing up here through the experiences of MIT OpenCourseWare and other open knowledge programs, and take a comparative look at the methods and metrics for operating in academic vs non-academic learning settings.

A concluding generative discussion will invite participants to explore together how the open education community might engage more broadly in informal lifelong learning with curiosity and intention.

Speakers

Curt Newton

Director, MIT OpenCourseWare, MIT Open Learning

Curt Newton leads MIT OpenCourseWare in supporting millions of global learners and educators every year with freely shared materials from over 2,500 MIT courses. He joined OpenCourseWare in 2004, shortly after its launch, captivated by the promise of open education, and worked as... Read More →

Wednesday October 7, 2026 1:40pm - 2:10pm EDT
6 - Dining Room 4 - 6th Floor MIT Samberg Conference Center, 50 Memorial Drive, Cambridge MA 02139 USA

Presentation

Speaker Modality In-person
Track Hacking the Open Ecosystem and Praxis for the Public Good

1:40pm EDT

Global South Knowledge in Northern Systems: Rethinking Teacher Integration Through Open Educational Practices

Wednesday October 7, 2026 1:40pm - 2:10pm EDT

4 - Salon T - 7th Floor

ID: 31224

Across many education systems in the Global North, internationally trained teachers are increasingly recruited to address persistent teacher shortages and respond to growing linguistic and cultural diversity in classrooms. However, the professional integration of these educators often unfolds within institutional frameworks that implicitly privilege Northern epistemologies, pedagogical traditions, and professional norms. As a result, the knowledge and pedagogical expertise developed in the Global South frequently remain undervalued or invisible within host education systems.

This presentation examines how open educational practices (OEP) can provide a transformative framework for rethinking the integration of internationally trained teachers while promoting knowledge as a global public good. Drawing on doctoral research conducted in Ontario’s French-language and French immersion school systems in Canada, this study focuses particularly on educators trained in Cameroon who are navigating professional entry and adaptation within Canadian schools.

Using a blended ethnographic and critical autoethnographic methodology, the research explores how internationally trained teachers negotiate professional identity, knowledge legitimacy, and pedagogical adaptation as they transition between educational systems. The findings highlight persistent epistemic asymmetries that shape teacher integration processes, where internationally trained educators are frequently expected to adapt to dominant institutional models while their own professional knowledge remains under-recognized.

The presentation argues that open educational practices—including open educational resources (OER), collaborative knowledge-sharing networks, and transnational professional learning communities—can help challenge these asymmetries by enabling more equitable forms of knowledge circulation between the Global South and Global North. Through open platforms and collaborative knowledge ecosystems, internationally trained educators can participate not only as recipients of professional development but also as contributors to global pedagogical knowledge.

By situating teacher integration within broader open knowledge ecosystems, this session proposes a shift away from assimilation-based models toward a model of reciprocal epistemic exchange, in which diverse pedagogical traditions are recognized as valuable sources of educational innovation.

Ultimately, the presentation highlights how open educational practices can support migrant educators, democratize knowledge production, and foster more inclusive and globally connected education systems.

Speakers

Eric Keunne

PhD Candidate & School Principal (K-12), York University (Glendon Campus), Toronto, Canada

Eric Keunne is a PhD candidate in French Studies at York University whose research examines the professional integration of internationally trained teachers in Ontario’s French-language and French immersion school systems. His work focuses particularly on educators trained in Cameroon... Read More →

Wednesday October 7, 2026 1:40pm - 2:10pm EDT
4 - Salon T - 7th Floor MIT Samberg Conference Center, 50 Memorial Drive, Cambridge MA 02139 USA

Presentation

Speaker Modality In-person
Track Innovating Open Content to Democratize Knowledge

1:40pm EDT

Identify, Connect, and Refresh: A Practical Framework for Multi-Institutional Collaboration to Democratize Educational Resources

Wednesday October 7, 2026 1:40pm - 2:10pm EDT

5 - Dining Room 3 - 6th Floor

ID: 32112

This abstract documents the author and his team’s application of a three-step framework to facilitate collaboration among the six technical institutes of higher education in Singapore. These national institutes are namely Singapore Polytechnic (SP, the author’s affiliation), Ngee Ann Polytechnic, Temasek Polytechnic, Nanyang Polytechnic, Republic Polytechnic, and Institute of Technical Education. The collaboration enabled the democratization of shared educational resources on their jointly-developed one-stop online portal known as POLITEMall, by applying the practical framework of identify, connect, and refresh.

The first step of the framework is to strategically identify which institute is to be in charge of creating and maintaining which subject modules (also known as courses in the United States) on POLITEMall. For instance, SP is renowned for engineering among the six institutes and is hence responsible for the online modules related to built environment, engineering, and maritime. This strategy maximizes the academic quality and rigor of the online modules on POLITEMall, as the most qualified lecturers will be responsible for the modules in their relevant fields. The massive workload to create and maintain all the 297 diverse online modules is also equitably shared among the respective institutes in charge.

Subsequently, the second step of the framework is to intentionally connect learners to the online modules that are directly relevant to them. For instance, students in the mechanical engineering diploma courses (also known as programs in the United States) will be pre-enrolled in online modules such as Mechanics and Thermofluids (the author’s module in SP). This strategy ensures learners are intentionally aligned to their educational needs and interests, hence also enhancing knowledge retention of the online modules. Nonetheless, all of the approximately 120,000 full-time and part-time students and staff across the six institutes can virtually self-enroll for free to access any of the 297 diverse online modules on POLITEMall.

Lastly, the third step of the framework is to periodically refresh the online modules for sustained quality, relevance, and currency of the shared educational resources on POLITEMall. For instance, at the end of every semester after student feedback surveys, lecturers will bridge any content gaps within their online modules during the breaks. Moreover, subject-matter expert lecturers from the six institutes have mutually agreed to convene every two to three years to review the POLITEMall online modules, ensuring their content remains relevant and current.

Today’s world is increasingly fragmented and more nations are working in silos. The future of our global and local educational landscapes should instead be based on open knowledge, communication, and collaboration. By applying this practical three-step framework of identify, connect, and refresh, institutes can move beyond initial silos and toward a more sustainable future of shared educational resources and democratized knowledge on a national level.

Speakers

Ying-Wei Leong

Senior Lecturer (Distinguished Educator) and Teaching & Learning Mentor, Singapore Polytechnic

Mr. Ying-Wei Leong is currently a Senior Lecturer (Distinguished Educator) and Teaching & Learning Mentor in the School of Mechanical & Aeronautical Engineering, Singapore Polytechnic. He teaches engineering core modules and also supervises final year projects, including an industry... Read More →

Wednesday October 7, 2026 1:40pm - 2:10pm EDT
5 - Dining Room 3 - 6th Floor MIT Samberg Conference Center, 50 Memorial Drive, Cambridge MA 02139 USA

Presentation

Speaker Modality In-person
Track Innovating Open Content to Democratize Knowledge

1:40pm EDT

OER and Knowledge Without a Market Share

Wednesday October 7, 2026 1:40pm - 2:10pm EDT

2 - Salon M - 7th Floor

ID: 30932

In the limited funding available for the creation of open access materials, both at institutional levels and through other means, the focus has been on return on investment, on courses with high enrollment or on general education courses that would be useful for multiple institutions. This approach has made sense as it speaks very clearly to the goal of OER to lower textbook costs on a significant scale for students. However, it does not take into consideration courses with topics that contribute rather to access of materials that students would not normally receive, rather than an aggregate amount of savings.

This session will consider this concept from the perspective of a medievalist. Those in my field have had an increasing problem with general medieval literature textbooks is that they are often unable – or unwilling – to keep up with the current issues in medieval studies, particularly those related to diversity, such as the relatively new approach to the global Middle Ages, and marginalized communities, such as people with disabilities. Yet, textbooks with the goal of rectifying this oversight tend to be singularly focused and do not necessarily include a broad range of sources, which makes them difficult to use as the primary book in especially a survey course.

OER is particularly well-situated to remedy these issues because it does not rely on publishers who are concerned with market shares in terms of what they decide to produce, and it is flexible for multiple uses in a variety of pedagogical situations, even brief lessons.

As an example, we will discuss the funding, creation, and publication of an open access textbook that serves as an introduction to medieval disability studies for undergraduates, in particular. There are very few resources for teaching medieval disability to undergraduate students because it is only now becoming a topic of consideration even at the graduate level. Thus, there is a dearth of organized textbooks that include everything needed. There is a Medieval Disability Sourcebook: Western Europe, but its aim is to provide primary sources, not serve as a textbook to the subject.

This open access textbook on Medieval Disability introduces students both to the topic of disability in the Middle Ages as well as to the broader study of disability. There are introductions to the different types of sources that we can analyze, including literature, archaeology, material culture, art, etc. It focuses on physical as well as invisible disabilities, language and translation issues, social integration, treatments, and technologies, among other topics. In particular, it focuses on addressing popular misconceptions about historical disability.

This open access textbook provides the missing resource that many in the field have been requesting. But yet it is a resource that is difficult to “sell” to traditional publishers because the field is itself small. This example allows us to consider the democratization of knowledge beyond the market share.

Speakers

Kisha Tracy

Professor, English Studies, Fitchburg State University

Dr. Kisha G. Tracy is a Professor and Chair of English Studies and Chair of the General Education Program at Fitchburg State University. She received her Ph.D. in Medieval Studies from the University of Connecticut. In addition to several articles, her first book was published by... Read More →

Wednesday October 7, 2026 1:40pm - 2:10pm EDT
2 - Salon M - 7th Floor MIT Samberg Conference Center, 50 Memorial Drive, Cambridge MA 02139 USA

Presentation

Speaker Modality In-person
Track Innovating Open Content to Democratize Knowledge

2:15pm EDT

Empowering Secondary Education via Open Higher Education Modules: The UHCOOL Framework

Wednesday October 7, 2026 2:15pm - 2:45pm EDT

4 - Salon T - 7th Floor

ID: 31964

The rapid evolution of global education standards has placed unprecedented pressure on secondary schools to deliver specialized, high-quality elective curricula. While universities possess an abundance of digital expertise, translating this knowledge into accessible K-12 formats remains a significant hurdle. Traditional digital initiatives, such as standard MOOCs, often fail to achieve meaningful impact in high school settings because they lack integration with local teachers and pedagogical adaptability. This results in a structural discrepancy where rural and under-resourced schools remain isolated from higher education’s intellectual wealth.

To address this, we present the "University/High-school Collaboration On Online Learning" (UHCOOL) framework, spearheaded by the "ewant" open education platform. UHCOOL moves beyond simple content sharing to establish a sustainable governance model for digital knowledge transfer. Its primary goal is to democratize access to advanced subjects by transforming complex university-level curricula into modular, flexible Open Educational Resources (OER) specifically tailored for secondary education.

The operational core of UHCOOL is a collaborative nexus involving universities, secondary schools, and industry partners. Rather than delivering a "one-size-fits-all" curriculum, the project utilizes a sophisticated dual-layered digital architecture. By providing each high school with a localized Open Learning Environment (OLE) based on the Moodle platform, the system empowers local educators to act as curators rather than just facilitators. Teachers can access high-level university "benchmark courses"—including videos, assessments, and slide decks—and then adapt or merge these modules with their own localized teaching strategies. This ensures that university faculty's expertise is supported by high school teachers' classroom management skills.

The effectiveness of this decentralized OER model is evidenced by its rapid adoption. A flagship course on semiconductor technology, for instance, bridged the gap for nearly 2,000 students across 51 schools in its first year, with participation expected to nearly double by 2025. Feedback indicates that providing a robust "pedagogical skeleton" allows teachers to focus on student engagement and critical thinking rather than starting curriculum design from scratch.

In conclusion, the UHCOOL initiative illustrates that the true democratization of education lies in the balance between openness to resources and local pedagogical autonomy. By reframing university content as adaptable modules within a cross-institutional framework, we provide a scalable solution for educational equity. This model serves as a vital blueprint for leveraging OER to ensure specialized knowledge is a public good accessible to all learners, regardless of location.

Speakers

Ken-Zen Chen

Professor of e-Learning and Associate Director of HERO Center, National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University

Ken-Zen Chen serves as a Professor at the Institute of Education, National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University (NYCU), Taiwan. His scholarly work focuses on digital learning ecosystems, institutional collaboration, and the practical application of Open Educational Resources (OER). As... Read More →

Yun-Chia Jasmine Chang

Professor and Director of HERO Center, National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University

Professor Yung-Chia Chang is a faculty member in the Department of Industrial Engineering and Management at National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University and a key contributor to the HERO Center’s work on open higher education resources. She received her B.S. and M.S. degrees in Industrial... Read More →

Wei-I Lee

Research Fellow of HERO Center, National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University

Wei-I Lee is a professor in the Department of Electrophysics at National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University and has served as the director of the Research Center of Higher Educational Resources for Openness (HERO Center). He obtained his B.S. in Electrophysics from National Chiao Tung... Read More →

Wednesday October 7, 2026 2:15pm - 2:45pm EDT
4 - Salon T - 7th Floor MIT Samberg Conference Center, 50 Memorial Drive, Cambridge MA 02139 USA

Presentation

Speaker Modality Hybrid
Track Innovating Open Content to Democratize Knowledge

2:15pm EDT

Listening to Teachers: A U.S.–Finland Collaboration to Develop Open AI Literacy Resources

Wednesday October 7, 2026 2:15pm - 2:45pm EDT

2 - Salon M - 7th Floor

ID: 31135

An Erasmus-supported collaboration between Mount St. Joseph University (United States) and Laurea University of Applied Sciences (Finland) brings multidisciplinary students together to explore artificial intelligence and digital innovation through international, project-based learning. In shared courses offered across both institutions, students work in global teams during the semester to design and prototype AI-related projects that address real-world problems. Through this project-based learning model, students engage in iterative design, collaborative problem solving, and reflective discussion about the social and ethical implications of artificial intelligence.

These collaborations culminate in intensive project weeks in which students travel between campuses, refine their ideas through collaborative workshops, and present their work to international audiences. The partnership emphasizes experiential learning, cross-cultural collaboration, and the development of practical solutions to emerging technology challenges. Through these experiences, students gain exposure to different educational systems, technological perspectives, and cultural approaches to innovation while developing skills in teamwork, communication, and applied AI literacy.

This session foregrounds the role of international academic exchange in shaping these learning experiences. The Erasmus partnership allows students to move beyond virtual collaboration and participate in short-term study-abroad exchanges where they work together in person during intensive project weeks. These exchanges provide opportunities for students to experience different educational cultures, develop intercultural communication skills, and engage directly with peers from other national contexts. For institutions seeking to integrate emerging technologies into global learning initiatives, the project offers a model for combining study-abroad programming, collaborative coursework, and interdisciplinary innovation.

As part of this collaboration, students also contribute to the development of open educational resources (OER) designed to support educators navigating generative artificial intelligence in teaching and learning. Working alongside faculty mentors, students translate their project experiences into openly licensed teaching materials that provide practical guidance on ethical AI use, assignment design, and responsible integration of AI tools. Because these materials are openly licensed, they can be freely shared, adapted, and improved by educators around the world. In this way, OER not only disseminates the outcomes of the project but also creates opportunities for ongoing global collaboration, enabling educators in different countries to build upon shared materials and contribute new perspectives and practices.

These student-generated resources are informed by a qualitative study examining how K–12 teachers are currently navigating generative artificial intelligence in their classrooms. Interviews with teachers across subject areas and school contexts reveal how educators are redesigning assignments, establishing boundaries for acceptable AI assistance, and negotiating new expectations for academic integrity as student AI use expands. These insights help ensure that the resulting OER materials address real classroom needs rather than abstract policy debates.

This presentation will be of particular interest to educators and program leaders interested in global exchanges, short-term study abroad, and international collaborative learning. By connecting student mobility, project-based learning, and open educational resource development, the project demonstrates how global partnerships can create meaningful learning experiences while contributing openly licensed teaching materials that support educators navigating generative AI in classrooms worldwide.

Speakers

Rebecca J. Allen

Chair of Department of Computer Science and Mathematics, Mount St. Joseph University

Rebecca J. Allen, PhD, is Assistant Professor and Chair of Computer Science and Mathematics at Mount St. Joseph University. Her interdisciplinary research focuses on artificial intelligence in education, participatory research, and open educational resources that support equitable... Read More →

Brook Batch

Asst. Professor, Mount St. Joseph University

Dr. Brook Batch is an Assistant Professor of Social Computing at Mount St. Joseph University. Her research explores the intersection of technology and education, with a focus on computing education, students’ development of research and writing practices, and the use of generative... Read More →

Tero Uusitalo

Senior Lecturer, Laurea University of Applied Sciences

MSc Tero Uusitalo is a Senior Lecturer in the Business Management Department at Laurea University of Applied Sciences. His research focuses on working life connected pedagogy, international research, development and innovation as well as the development and application of artificial... Read More →

Taru Tallgren

Senior Lecturer in Degree Programme in Business Management, Laurea University of Applied Sciences

Taru Tallgren is a Senior Lecturer in the Business Management Department at Laurea University of Applied Sciences. Her research focuses on working‑life‑connected and coaching‑based pedagogy, as well as pedagogical innovations that support flexible open learning models and equitable... Read More →

Wednesday October 7, 2026 2:15pm - 2:45pm EDT
2 - Salon M - 7th Floor MIT Samberg Conference Center, 50 Memorial Drive, Cambridge MA 02139 USA

Presentation

Speaker Modality Hybrid
Track (Re)Inventing our Shared Global Vision Together

2:15pm EDT

The California ZTC Degree Grant Program: Preliminary Outcomes and What We’re Learning

Wednesday October 7, 2026 2:15pm - 2:45pm EDT

6 - Dining Room 4 - 6th Floor

ID: 33763

In 2021, California made a historic commitment to college affordability by authorizing the largest public investment to date in Open Educational Resources (OER) and Zero Textbook Cost (ZTC) pathways. This landmark initiative aims to reduce the financial burden of course materials and improve equitable access to higher education. Beginning in 2022, all California Community Colleges received dedicated funding to support the development, implementation, and scaling of ZTC pathways across disciplines. By 2026, colleges across the system are actively developing more than one thousand ZTC pathways, representing a transformative shift in how instructional materials are selected, delivered, and experienced by students. As the largest system of higher education in the United States, the California Community Colleges provide a unique opportunity to examine the large-scale impact of OER and ZTC adoption on student success, retention, and overall educational experience.

This session will explore early findings from the ZTC grant program while also highlighting emerging research directions and unanswered questions. Participants will gain insight into how colleges are approaching ZTC implementation, including the strategies they have found most effective as well as the challenges they continue to navigate. The session will also examine how researchers are estimating cost savings across more than 100 institutions, offering a closer look at methodologies used to quantify financial impact at scale.

In addition, attendees will hear student feedback from ZTC courses, providing valuable perspective on how these initiatives influence learning, engagement, and access.

The session will further highlight a complementary study conducted by researchers at UC Irvine’s School of Education, supported by the Arnold Ventures Foundation, which seeks to evaluate the effectiveness of both statewide and institutional policies aimed at reducing student cost burdens.

Finally, participants will receive access to instruments used for institutional and student surveys, enabling them to apply similar assessment approaches within their own contexts. Together, these insights will provide a comprehensive view of the promise and complexity of scaling ZTC pathways across a large and diverse higher education system.

Speakers

James Glapa-Grossklag

Dean, Educational Technology, Learning Resources and Distance Learning; and Technical Assistance Provider, College of the Canyons; and ZTC Grant Program California Community College Chancellor’s Office

James Glapa-Grossklag is Dean, Educational Technology, Learning Resources, and Distance Learning at College of the Canyons (USA). He serves as Technical Assistance Provider for the California Community Colleges' Zero Textbook Cost Degree Program, the largest-ever public investment... Read More →

Richard Arum

Professor of Sociology and Education and former dean of the School of Education at University of California, Irvine., University of California, Irvine.

Richard Arum is Professor of Sociology and Education and former dean of the School of Education at University of California, Irvine. He served as senior fellow at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and director of Education Research Programs at the Social Science Research Council... Read More →

Sabrina Solanki

Research & Program Director for the Postsecondary Education Research & Implementation Institute at the University of California, Irvine., University of California, Irvine.

Sabrina Solanki is Research & Program Director for the Postsecondary Education Research & Implementation Institute at the University of California, Irvine. Her research focuses on higher education policy, STEM education, and the evaluation of education interventions. In her current... Read More →

Alyssa Nguyen

Senior Director of Research and Innovation, The RP Group

Alyssa Nguyen is the Senior Director of Research and Innovation for The RP Group and brings over 15 years of experience in the California Community Colleges. Her work is dedicated to uncovering and implementing student-centered practices that close equity gaps and promote student... Read More →

Larry Cooperman

Consultant, University of California, Irvine

Larry Cooperman retired from the University of California, Irvine in 2020, where he directed open education from 2007-2018. Since his retirement, he has consulted the Technical Assistance Provider for the California Community Colleges Zero-Textbook-Cost (ZTC) program. Currently, he... Read More →

Wednesday October 7, 2026 2:15pm - 2:45pm EDT
6 - Dining Room 4 - 6th Floor MIT Samberg Conference Center, 50 Memorial Drive, Cambridge MA 02139 USA

Presentation

Speaker Modality In-person
Track Hacking the Open Ecosystem and Praxis for the Public Good

2:15pm EDT

Who Owns Learning? Sovereignty, Solidarity, and Open Education Across Divided Worlds

Wednesday October 7, 2026 2:15pm - 2:45pm EDT

5 - Dining Room 3 - 6th Floor

ID: 33604

In a time shaped by geopolitical conflict, displacement, and widening inequalities in access to education, some basic questions feel newly urgent: Who owns learning? Who gets to participate in it?Who gets to shape it?Who gets to carry it across borders?

This session takes up these questions through open education, transnational didactics, and trauma-informed teaching, drawing on a 13-week open, blended course developed at the University of Stuttgart.The course brings together student teachers from Germany, Ukraine, Lebanon, and more than ten other countries into a shared online learning space that deliberately foregrounds human connection, creativity, and curiosity.

Working in transnational teams, participants design project-based learning (PBL) experiences. 17 projects including toolkits, lesson plans, videos and websites were developed.

The session involved chat prompts, polls and pointed reflection questions for participants to actively engage with during the 30 minutes. Conference attendees will learn how the course moves beyond delivering content to become a space where open, educational sovereignty can be practiced—where learners and educators co-create meaningful, context-sensitive learning across cultural and political boundaries.

This course is situated within global conversations, including UNESCO’s vision of inclusive and equitable education and the International Council for Open and Distance Education (ICDE) focus on access and innovation in digital learning. At the same time, it does not avoid the realities many participants are living through. War, instability, and uncertainty are present in the space. For that reason, the course draws on trauma-informed principles, intentionally creating conditions of psychological safety, flexibility, and trust—conditions that make open, genuine collaboration possible.

A central idea guiding the course is anti-fragility. Rather than simply trying to withstand disruption, the design invites uncertainty and diversity to become sources of learning. Students take on the role of designers, negotiating perspectives, constraints, and opportunities as they work. In doing so, curiosity and creativity are not added extras—they emerge naturally through the process, removing barriers, alongside growing intercultural awareness and resilience.

In this session, participants will see how open, transnational learning spaces can function as sites of both solidarity and agency. The session will share concrete design strategies for structuring international collaboration, integrating trauma-informed approaches, and connecting practice to global frameworks. Examples from student projects will show how shared challenges can lead to inventive, locally meaningful solutions.

Speakers

Richard Powers

Professor, University of Stuttgart, Department of Education

Richard J. Powers is a professor, instructional designer, and international educator at the University of Stuttgart and City Colleges of Chicago. His work focuses on open education, international collaboration, and project-based learning in global, online environments, alongside Universal... Read More →

Wednesday October 7, 2026 2:15pm - 2:45pm EDT
5 - Dining Room 3 - 6th Floor MIT Samberg Conference Center, 50 Memorial Drive, Cambridge MA 02139 USA

Presentation

Speaker Modality Online
Track Catalyzing Human Connection Creativity and Curiosity to Thrive

3:00pm EDT

OER Beyond Gen Ed: Lessons from Washington’s Professional-Technical Programs

Wednesday October 7, 2026 3:00pm - 3:30pm EDT

7 - Dining Room 5 - 6th Floor

ID: 31247

Open Educational Resources (OER) initiatives have largely focused on general education courses such as math, English, and introductory sciences. However, professional-technical (ProfTech) programs face a different set of challenges when it comes to course materials. These fields often rely on expensive, commercial textbooks, rapidly evolving industry content, certification-aligned materials, and highly visual or technical resources.

Washington State’s Open ProfTech initiative explores how open textbooks can be developed in professional-technical programs across community and technical colleges. Through statewide collaboration, faculty authors worked with instructional designers, editors, illustrators, migration specialists, copyright and OER experts, and accessibility specialists, coordinated by SBCTC, the state agency serving Washington’s community and technical colleges, to create openly licensed textbooks aligned with industry expectations.

This session shares practical lessons from this initiative, including the unique challenges of developing OER in professional technical education disciplines, strategies that helped faculty authors succeed, and what other institutions or systems should consider when launching similar efforts.

Rather than focusing on project details alone, the presentation highlights key insights about supporting proftech faculty, managing rapidly changing content, and building sustainable infrastructure for open publishing in technical fields.

Participants will leave with practical ideas for expanding OER beyond general education into workforce and career programs.

Speakers

Boyoung Chae

Policy Associate, Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges

Boyoung Chae is a Policy Associate of Educational Technology and Open Education with the Washington State Board for Community & Technical Colleges (SBCTC). She completed a master’s in Instructional Systems from Pennsylvania State University and a PhD in Instructional Technology... Read More →

Monique Belair

Program Administrator, Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges

Monique Belair is a Program Administrator for Educational Technology and Open Education with the Washington State Board for Community & Technical Colleges (SBCTC). She is currently managing her second U.S. Department of Education grant for the Washington Open ProfTech Project. Monique... Read More →

Wednesday October 7, 2026 3:00pm - 3:30pm EDT
7 - Dining Room 5 - 6th Floor MIT Samberg Conference Center, 50 Memorial Drive, Cambridge MA 02139 USA

Presentation

Speaker Modality In-person
Track Innovating Open Content to Democratize Knowledge

3:00pm EDT

Open All the Way Down: A Freely Reusable Toolkit for Scaling OER, Access, and Equity

Wednesday October 7, 2026 3:00pm - 3:30pm EDT

5 - Dining Room 3 - 6th Floor

ID: 33595

Open educational resources promise to democratize access to knowledge, but the organizational capacity to implement OER sustainably is rarely open itself. Colleges and institutions that want to launch or scale OER and Zero Textbook Cost (ZTC) initiatives must typically build their infrastructure, workflows, faculty support systems, and assessment frameworks from scratch. This is its own barrier to the public good that open education aspires to serve.

This session argues that opening up institutional knowledge, not just course content, is the next frontier for the open education movement. It introduces the CRC OER/ZTC Toolkit, developed at Cosumnes River College (CRC) in Sacramento, California, as a case study in what it looks like to treat implementation infrastructure as a public good.

CRC serves a diverse student population in which many learners come from low-income households and communities historically underserved by higher education. Textbook costs were a documented barrier: students were delaying purchases, attempting courses without required materials, and in some cases dropping classes they could not afford. Beginning in 2021, a faculty librarian and OER coordinator began building the systems needed to address this - supporting faculty in adopting, remixing, and creating OER; developing workflows for identifying and advertising ZTC courses; and using student success data to make the case for continued institutional investment. By fall 2025, 78% of CRC course sections were designated Zero Textbook Cost, with documented gains in enrollment, course success rates, and degree completion.

The CRC OER/ZTC Toolkit packages the lessons from this work into an openly licensed, freely reusable website. It includes implementation guides, faculty adoption workflows, open pedagogy resources, student focus group templates, and a data dashboard framework for tracking equity outcomes. Every element carries an open license, meaning any institution, anywhere, can copy, adapt, and redistribute the toolkit without asking permission and without starting from zero.

This is the session's central contribution to the OEGlobal community: a concrete example of open licensing applied to the institutional infrastructure of OER work, not just the content.

When colleges share their implementation knowledge openly, they extend the democratizing potential of open education beyond individual courses to the systems that make open education sustainable and scalable. This approach is especially significant for under-resourced institutions that lack the grant funding or staffing to build these systems independently.

Attendees will have the opportunity to explore the toolkit directly and will leave with a clear understanding of its components, the equity impact data behind it, and practical strategies for adapting it to their own institutional or regional context. The session welcomes practitioners at any stage of OER work. Though it was designed for community colleges, the lessons learned could be applicable to any institution.

Speakers

Andi Adkins Pogue

Librarian, OER/ZTC Coordinator, Cosumnes River College

Andi Adkins Pogue is a faculty librarian and the OER/ZTC Coordinator at Cosumnes River College who has spent 16 years supporting equitable access to learning. She has been instrumental in building one of California's most active ZTC programs. She has authored OER, earned a Creative... Read More →

Wednesday October 7, 2026 3:00pm - 3:30pm EDT
5 - Dining Room 3 - 6th Floor MIT Samberg Conference Center, 50 Memorial Drive, Cambridge MA 02139 USA

Presentation

Speaker Modality In-person
Track Hacking the Open Ecosystem and Praxis for the Public Good

3:00pm EDT

Slowing Down to Lead: Design Lessons from the Rebus Luminary Fellowship

Wednesday October 7, 2026 3:00pm - 3:30pm EDT

6 - Dining Room 4 - 6th Floor

ID: 33914

Postsecondary leaders are exhausted. They are navigating defunded institutions, a shifting political landscape, rapid AI expansion, and the quiet accumulation of uncompensated labor that education has always asked of its practitioners. The Rebus Luminary Fellowship for Education Leaders was our response to that reality.

This presentation shares our experience co-designing and facilitating the Luminary Fellowship – a three-month program for fifteen postsecondary leaders across Canada and the United States, developed in partnership with the Leadership Learning Community (LLC), a nonprofit with deep roots in liberatory leadership practice. We'll speak honestly about what it meant to build a space where connection, creativity, and curiosity weren't just aspirations on a slide but conditions we had to actively create.

There is a meaningful difference between valuing something and designing for it. We valued slowness, so we built long check-ins and resisted the urge to pack every session with content. We valued trust, so we thought carefully about what a participant should receive before ever showing up to a session, like a welcome care package in the mail. We valued an honest community, so we gave sessions enough breathing room for discomfort to surface and built in 1:1 check-ins between sessions to tend to what the group couldn't. The Liberatory Leadership Framework, developed by LLC, became our recurring lens: a shared vocabulary that participants could carry across sessions and bring back to their own institutions.

This presentation will walk through the program's arc – three virtual sessions and a culminating in-person summit in Vancouver – with particular attention to the design choices behind each phase and how we adapted in real time. We'll reflect on the genuine collaboration between Rebus and LLC: what it looked like to co-design across organizations, how we distributed facilitation, and what we learned when things didn't go as planned.

We'll also share what we heard from participants themselves – that the strategies mattered, but what stayed with them was simpler and harder to name: the feeling of not being alone in this work.

Our hope is that this session sparks an honest conversation about what it actually takes to make space for human connection in open education programming – the choices behind the design, what we learned along the way, and what we'd do differently. For anyone building fellowships, communities of practice, or professional development experiences, we think the Luminary Fellowship offers a useful, honest case study in what intentional community building can look like.

Speakers

Amber Hoye

Director of Programs, The Rebus Foundation

Amber Hoye is Director of Programs at The Rebus Foundation, where she designs and leads professional development opportunities and consulting support for educators. She brings over 14 years of leadership experience to her work in open education. Her work is dedicated to making learning... Read More →

Apurva Ashok

Executive Director, The Rebus Foundation

Apurva Ashok is the Executive Director of The Rebus Foundation, a global non-profit and Canadian charity advancing liberatory futures through education. Apurva is an accomplished leader in Open Education, and is recognized for her ability to inspire systemic change and build institutional... Read More →

Apurva Ashok

Wednesday October 7, 2026 3:00pm - 3:30pm EDT
6 - Dining Room 4 - 6th Floor MIT Samberg Conference Center, 50 Memorial Drive, Cambridge MA 02139 USA

Presentation

Speaker Modality Online
Track Catalyzing Human Connection Creativity and Curiosity to Thrive

3:00pm EDT

The Work at the Hinge: Mini Structures and Human-Centered Open Education

Wednesday October 7, 2026 3:00pm - 3:30pm EDT

2 - Salon M - 7th Floor

ID: 31087

Open education often assumes a shared threshold, as if practitioners are all standing before the same door with the same key, the same confidence, and the same amount of time to turn the handle. They are not. For some, the door opens easily into spacious possibility. For others, it sticks, locked by uncertainty, time scarcity, inaccessible information, perfectionism, policy confusion, or the quiet fear of getting it wrong in public.

This session argues that if Open Education is serious about access, it cannot reserve its gentleness for students alone. It must meet practitioners at the threshold too, attending to the tiny details where entry is either made possible or made impossible. Drawing from two semesters of program design and implementation at a Hispanic-Serving Institution, I share a practical model of “mini structures” as threshold design: an inquiry-based OER exploration mini-grant that pays faculty for rigorous search and decision-ready documentation (rather than requiring premature adoption), paired with a scaffolded sequence of mini-lessons that translate complex Open Educational Practices into bounded steps with clear outcomes, examples, and time expectations.

The core claim is simple: a door is only open if someone can actually get through it. In many institutional contexts, the primary barriers are not ideological resistance. They are practical and quietly determinative: not knowing where to start, and starting alone.

I highlight the hinge details that repeatedly change follow-through without lowering rigor: bounded time containers (30–45 minute work sessions with a concrete deliverable), “what counts” guidance that reduces ambiguity, risk reduction through private drafts and optional publicness, and documentation-as-scaffolding (trackers, evaluation lenses, landscape briefs) that makes decisions visible, retrievable, and shareable.

Grounded in care ethics, I frame these choices as infrastructure rather than tone: care operationalized through systems that assume human variance as normal. Participants will leave with a replicable set of design patterns and a lightweight blueprint for building mini infrastructure in their own programs.

Speakers

Megan Brittany-Fruia Zara

Open Practice Strategist, The Open Practice Academy

Wednesday October 7, 2026 3:00pm - 3:30pm EDT
2 - Salon M - 7th Floor MIT Samberg Conference Center, 50 Memorial Drive, Cambridge MA 02139 USA

Presentation

Speaker Modality In-person
Track Catalyzing Human Connection Creativity and Curiosity to Thrive

3:35pm EDT

From Classrooms to Careers: Equipping Today’s Students with the Workforce Skills of Tomorrow Through OER

Wednesday October 7, 2026 3:35pm - 4:05pm EDT

2 - Salon M - 7th Floor

ID: 33396

Across disciplines and institutions, instructors face growing challenges related to student engagement and academic integrity. These challenges are compounded by the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) and rapidly shifting workforce demands. AI enables students to produce work that is not their own in seconds. Meanwhile, our workforce requires students to develop an ever-increasing set of skills and knowledge in order to obtain entry-level jobs. Traditional print textbooks and resources cannot keep up. Rather, these rapidly evolving technologies and workforce needs require students to learn from the most engaging, up-to-date, and relevant resources possible — like OER!

Drawing on global data from the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025, this session highlights the skills and competencies increasingly valued by employers worldwide. We’ll share practical strategies for customizing OER to support skill development, respond to emerging technologies, and meet local and industry-specific needs, all while maintaining academic rigor and relevance.

Attendees will move beyond theory to practical application. This session progresses from a high-level overview of workforce skill trends to the creation of customized, ready-to-use, openly licensed classroom materials. Participants will receive a template they can plug into the generative AI of their choosing (e.g., ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini) to create five ready-to-implement, skill-building activities rooted in the emerging skills and competencies noted in the Future of Jobs Report 2025. These activities are also designed to meet course objectives, incorporate OER content, and drive meaningful student engagement.

This session showcases how AI can serve as a co-pilot in OER creation rather than a threat to academic integrity, offering a proactive stance on emerging technology. Ultimately, this gives instructors hands-on experience with the skills the labor market requires of their students (i.e., AI literacy). Additionally, by focusing on universal workforce skills, this session is accessible to educators at various stages of OER adoption and inclusive of diverse global disciplines, from agriculture to nursing to finance.

Participants will leave this session being able to:

Identify the key challenges college educators are facing, including maintaining student engagement, managing the impact of AI, and equipping students with ever-changing, in-demand career skills.

Analyze emerging workforce skills and trends from the World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs Report 2025 and apply them to specific academic disciplines.

Explain how OER can be customized to support skill development while maintaining academic rigor.

Apply a structured AI prompt template to generate 1) skills-based learning activities aligned with course objectives, open content, and industry-specific needs, and 2) aligned instructional support materials (e.g., grading rubrics, scaffolding for struggling students).

Refine AI-generated activities to ensure they support individual course contexts, follow accessibility best practices, and meet activity design preferences.

Speakers

Lindsay Josephs

Marketing and Communications Lead, OpenStax, Rice University

Lindsay Josephs (she/her) is the higher education marketing and communications lead at OpenStax, the world’s largest publisher of OER textbooks. Lindsay creates and manages marketing campaigns for OpenStax's 60+ college textbooks and reading engagement tool, Assignable. She’s... Read More →

Wednesday October 7, 2026 3:35pm - 4:05pm EDT
2 - Salon M - 7th Floor MIT Samberg Conference Center, 50 Memorial Drive, Cambridge MA 02139 USA

Presentation

Speaker Modality Hybrid
Track Innovating Open Content to Democratize Knowledge

3:35pm EDT

From Vision to Impact: A Change Approach Toward Accessible Digital Educational Resources

Wednesday October 7, 2026 3:35pm - 4:05pm EDT

6 - Dining Room 4 - 6th Floor

ID: 32293

At HAN University of Applied Sciences, we aim to create an ecosystem where students and educators have effortless access to high‑quality learning resources, open, semi‑open, and commercial, so they can assemble the optimal blend for their teaching and learning needs.

At HAN, we believe that education should be accessible to everyone. In a time when it can sometimes be difficult to determine what is true and what is false, it is up to us to provide students with reliable information. Preferably through learning materials in various formats, so that students can choose the materials that suit them and enrich their studies. It’s also about using public resources wisely. Why keep reinventing the wheel? If we openly share and reuse the best materials, we gain in both quality and efficiency.

Rather than positioning openness as a standalone objective, HAN has developed a institution‑wide approach that embeds Open Educational Resources (OER) into everyday practice. This approach is grounded in five pillars: support, professional development, recognition & rewards, change management, and technical infrastructure.

1. Support.
We provide hands‑on guidance to educators and teams as they search for, select, create, and share educational resources. We are setting up a Content Support Team (CST) to assist instructors and teams. This support covers educational, legal, aesthetic, and technical questions, allowing instructors to focus on the content itself.

2. Professional development.
To strengthen OER literacy, we invest in targeted training programmes that help educators navigate copyright, Creative Commons licensing, accessibility requirements, and open pedagogical practices. To underpin this approach, we developed a competency profile for OER, grounded in existing frameworks and literature, as the foundation for our professionalisation programme. Modular workshops, e-learning, coaching trajectories, and learning communities build confidence and enable sustainable adoption.

3. Recognition and rewards.
OER creation and sharing often remain invisible forms of academic labor. At HAN, we address this by recognizing contributions to open knowledge within workload models, team goals, and performance dialogues. Faculty who develop openly licensed materials, improve existing resources, or experiment with open pedagogy receive acknowledgment consistent with the broader recognition and rewards movement in higher education.

4. Change management.
To achieve openness on a larger scale, cultural, structural, and behavioral changes are necessary. That is why we are adopting a structured approach to change management to align leadership, foster faculty engagement, dispel misconceptions about open licenses, and establish a clear governance framework. Managers are coached in this process as part of the change initiative. The faculties develop their own implementation plans, ensuring that their chosen approach fits within the existing challenges within the faculty.

5. Technical infrastructure.
Finally, a sustainable OER ecosystem depends on robust, architecture-aware technology. HAN strives to create an integrated environment in which faculty and students can discover, combine, and reuse materials from various repositories and platforms. We prioritize a single HAN learning materials repository where all learning materials are stored, from which quality checks can be performed, and from which they can then be easily shared openly.

Speakers

Marijn Post

Policy Advisor Learning with Technology, HAN University of Applied Sciences

Marijn Post is a leading expert in OER with extensive experience in digital learning and open education policy. In 2022 she won the national (SURF) Award for her work in the field of OER. She developed strategies for recognizing and rewarding OER contributions, but also developed... Read More →

Marja Versantvoort

Projectmanager HAN approach Digital Educational Resources, HAN University of Applied Sciences

Master’s in EducationIn 2016, Marja led a five-year national flagship project. This was a collaboration among 17 Dutch bachelor’s programs in Nursing, aimed at creating a community centered on the open sharing and collaborative development of educational resources. Following that... Read More →

Wednesday October 7, 2026 3:35pm - 4:05pm EDT
6 - Dining Room 4 - 6th Floor MIT Samberg Conference Center, 50 Memorial Drive, Cambridge MA 02139 USA

Presentation

Speaker Modality Hybrid
Track Hacking the Open Ecosystem and Praxis for the Public Good

3:35pm EDT

Open Knowledge Content Curation: From Scientific Information Watch to Self and Active Learning

Wednesday October 7, 2026 3:35pm - 4:05pm EDT

5 - Dining Room 3 - 6th Floor

ID: 33736

In the context of infobesity, managing knowledge and mastering scientific and societal information actuality is more and more a challenge for teachers, researchers and students. Content curation tools developped some years ago, help finding, selecting, commenting, elevating and sharing relevant open web information from diverse sources. One of those tools called Scoop.it appears well suited for so-called serious information and has been used by ourselves, other scientists and teachers individually or in groups of interest.

Teachers can indeed build content hubs on their discipline, for instance geography, history or biology. Researchers in basic, medical and also social sciences can establish their personal databases, document their research topics and share specific contents according to their competencies. Learners and curious laypeople can benefit from knowledge selected and accumulated and from information follow-up by recognized specialists

We are reporting on our experience of using Content Curation for Research, Teaching and Learning in basic, medical and health immunology for more than 10 years. We are agregating scientific information such as selected published papers but also grey literature, press releases and web posting on blogs and websites. Societally relevant information from social netwotks can also be collected and archived. Commenting and elevating information individually and/or through analysis of subtopics is adding value to such material. Sharing on social networks is an opportunity, while archiving and retrieving later is an asset.

Two projects were posted on Open Education Resources Surfing the Wave of Immunology Knowledge and more (SWIK+). becoming later Self and Active Learning in Immunology and more (SALIM+), after applying and evaluating the tool in real learning context.

Content Hubs aggregating curated OPEN medical immunology resources, from systemic and mucosal immunity to clinical and applied immunology (allergy, rheumatology, neurology, biotherapies) and societal health concerns (vaccine hesitancy) actualized regularly, are offering students, teachers and researchers selected relevant information, helping them stay abreast of information wave.

We used it for distance learning during Covid pandemy with chinese students and developped innovative self and active learning with french and chinese medical students for initiation in clinical research in a master module.

Learners can use the selected material offered by their teachers or other researchers. Themselves are asked to select, collect, read and comment medical and scientific information related to a chosen topic of interest. They discover not only scientific published literature, but also web material posted by press or media available to laypeople, as well as discussions on social networks. Such self and active learning different from top down courses they receive in medical training is much appreciated, making them curious and even coined by students as fun.

Content curation, compared to artificial intelligence, adds human flair to search practices and stimulates users to develop interest and taste for information watch, mandatory for research activities during training and for life long learning in their profession. Other advantages of content curation tool are sharing which remains a challenge, allowing to retrieve information later, also offering networking opportunities but hindrance reported is time consuming like any information watch.

Speakers

Gilbert Faure

Professeur, Université Lorraine, CREM

Professor Emeritus in Immunology at Université Lorraine, Faculté de Médecine, I have been pursuing teaching activities in the context of the Sino-French Training programs between Nancy, Wuhan and Kunming for more than 20 years, after a career in Medical Immunology. I had responsibilities... Read More →

Wednesday October 7, 2026 3:35pm - 4:05pm EDT
5 - Dining Room 3 - 6th Floor MIT Samberg Conference Center, 50 Memorial Drive, Cambridge MA 02139 USA

Presentation

Speaker Modality Online
Track Catalyzing Human Connection Creativity and Curiosity to Thrive

4:20pm EDT

Oak’s Open Knowledge Graph: The Missing Foundation for Curriculum-Aligned AI in Education

Wednesday October 7, 2026 4:20pm - 4:50pm EDT

6 - Dining Room 4 - 6th Floor

ID: 33911

Artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming educational technology, yet most AI tools in education lack a critical foundation: they have no formal understanding of how curriculum knowledge actually fits together. AI tools can discuss topics fluently, but cannot reliably sequence learning, identify what a student needs to know before tackling a new concept, or verify that a lesson genuinely addresses the standards or objectives it claims to. They guess because, typically, national curricula have existed only as documents written for humans, not in any form that digital tools can meaningfully interrogate.

This is a solvable problem. At Oak National Academy, a UK government-backed provider of free teaching resources used in three in four schools in England [1], we are building an answer. With over 100,000 open-licence resources spanning 17 national curriculum subjects, including more than 13,000 lessons, we hold a distinctive position: a large-scale, publicly trusted body of curriculum-aligned content, all freely available [2].

This session presents our work to build a knowledge graph that encodes curriculum structure in a form that AI tools can read, query, and reason about, along with the lessons we have learned so far from releasing it openly to the sector.

Our knowledge graph is a structured map of how curriculum knowledge connects, specifying which concepts must come before others, how topics in one subject relate to another, and what a sequence of learning actually looks like from a pupil’s perspective. When that map is machine-readable and openly available, it transforms what AI tools can do. Rather than guessing at curriculum relationships, AI tools can query structured data. The result is AI tools that genuinely support learning progression, plan well-sequenced, coherent curriculum materials, and identify gaps in available resources. This provides the solid foundations for safe and effective AI in education in any national context.

We have begun sharing our early knowledge graph capability [3] with a range of external organisations, including AI developers and edtech companies, to develop and stress-test this shared foundation.

England's forthcoming curriculum refresh offers a concrete illustration of why this matters. As the curriculum changes, AI tools trained on old frameworks risk undermining rather than supporting learning. We have been supporting the Department for Education in creating a digitised curriculum, designed with structured, machine-readable capabilities, such as knowledge graphs, in mind. When available, this will significantly increase the depth and richness of our knowledge graph, enabling even more reliable and sophisticated AI applications across the sector.

Open education principles are at the heart of this work: every organisation rebuilding curriculum structure from scratch is duplicating effort. A common, openly licensed foundation redirects that energy toward the applications and innovations that actually benefit learners.

In this session, we will share our experience and learnings, including the architectural decisions made, the standards chosen, and our licensing strategy, to enable any institution seeking to make its domain knowledge machine-readable to build upon this work.

Speakers

John Roberts

Interim CEO, Oak National Academy

John Roberts is the interim CEO of Oak National Academy, the UK government-backed provider of free, open-licence teaching resources used in three in four schools in England. A co-founder of the organisation, he previously led the product and engineering team behind Aila, the UK's... Read More →

Wednesday October 7, 2026 4:20pm - 4:50pm EDT
6 - Dining Room 4 - 6th Floor MIT Samberg Conference Center, 50 Memorial Drive, Cambridge MA 02139 USA

Presentation

Speaker Modality In-person
Track Hacking the Open Ecosystem and Praxis for the Public Good

4:20pm EDT

Offline AI, Open Knowledge: Delivering OER to Schools Without Internet

Wednesday October 7, 2026 4:20pm - 4:50pm EDT

7 - Dining Room 5 - 6th Floor

ID: 31657

Across Africa, and some parts of Asia millions of learners sit in classrooms that are rich in curiosity but poor in connectivity. For these students, the promise of open education , freely accessible, world-class knowledge for anyone, anywhere, remains largely theoretical. The internet is the assumed delivery mechanism for most OER platforms, and where the internet is absent or unreliable, so too is access to open content.

AXAM is an offline AI-powered learning platform built to close that gap. Developed through the NSF Innovation Corps (I-Corps) program, AXAM packages high-quality open educational resources, beginning with MIT OpenCourseWare transcripts and expanding to broader OER collections, into a locally deployable system that runs entirely without an internet connection. Students interact with AXAM through a conversational AI interface powered by a lightweight large language model, asking questions, exploring concepts, and receiving contextualized responses drawn from curated OER content. No cloud. No bandwidth. No barriers.

This session presents the AXAM model as both a technical case study and a provocation for the open education community. The presenter will walk through the architecture of the system: how OER content is processed, embedded, and stored in a vector database; how a quantized language model runs efficiently on low-cost hardware; and how multilingual retrieval supports learners across English, French, Swahili, and Kinyarwanda and others.

Crucially, the session will move beyond the technical to examine what deployment actually looks like in contexts where infrastructure, teacher capacity, and institutional trust are all variables that no algorithm can fully anticipate.

The lessons from building and testing AXAM are honest ones. Multilingual performance is uneven; Kinyarwanda retrieval lags significantly behind English, raising important questions about whose languages open AI systems are truly built for. Hardware constraints shape every design decision. Community trust must be earned before any technology is adopted. These are not edge cases; they are the core design conditions for open education in much of the world.

What this session ultimately offers is a replicable framework, a set of architectural principles, deployment considerations, and community engagement strategies that any institution, NGO, or open education practitioner can adapt for their own low-connectivity context. The goal is not to present AXAM as a finished solution, but to share what has been learned in the process of building it, and to invite the global open education community into the next phase of that work.

Because openness without accessibility is just a promise. And a promise that only reaches those with a stable internet connection is not yet open enough.

Speakers

Emmanuel Olimi Kasigazi

Entrepreneurial Lead, Axam AI

Emmanuel Olimi is a data and LLM engineer, open education advocate, and founder of AXAM, an offline AI-powered learning platform designed to deliver MIT OpenCourseWare and other open education content to students in low-connectivity schools across the world. Born in Uganda and now... Read More →

Wednesday October 7, 2026 4:20pm - 4:50pm EDT
7 - Dining Room 5 - 6th Floor MIT Samberg Conference Center, 50 Memorial Drive, Cambridge MA 02139 USA

Presentation

Speaker Modality In-person
Track Exploring Emergent Technologies and the Future of Openness

4:20pm EDT

Resilience and Responsiveness: Lessons of Open Practices in Emergencies

Wednesday October 7, 2026 4:20pm - 4:50pm EDT

5 - Dining Room 3 - 6th Floor

ID: 33611

We are living through a period of significant global instability, marked by political uncertainty, challenges to multilateralism, and increasing risks of conflict and disruption. These dynamics place pressure on education systems worldwide, raising urgent questions about how to ensure continuity, accessibility, and relevance.

In this context, Open Educational Resources (OER) and broader open education practices offer a promising foundation for more resilient and adaptable systems, as they combine the affordances of digital technologies with relational, learner-centred approaches, an integration that proved essential during the COVID-19 pandemic. This paper examines what lessons from open education in emergency contexts can inform the development of more robust open ecosystems globally.

This study argues that effective open education systems must demonstrate two key characteristics: responsiveness to user needs and resilience to external pressures. While these qualities are widely discussed, they remain under-examined in terms of how they are enacted across different contexts. In particular, emergency settings such as conflict, displacement, or systemic disruption offer a unique lens through which to observe how open practices adapt under pressure.

To investigate this, the presentation reports on findings from a qualitative comparative study of open education initiatives in both emergency and non-emergency contexts. The analysis draws on semi-structured interviews conducted with two groups: (1) learners engaging with open educational platforms, and (2) stakeholders involved in governance and decision-making processes. This dual perspective enables an examination of both user experience and systemic organisation.

The findings, derived through thematic analysis, highlight patterns across contexts, with particular attention to how responsiveness to user needs and resilience to external pressures are operationalised in practice. The study is guided by two research questions:

How do user needs in open educational platforms differ between emergency and non-emergency contexts?
How do governance structures and processes differ across these contexts?

This research contributes to the emerging field of Open Education in Emergencies by extending its focus beyond short-term crises to include longer-term and systemic disruptions. By examining practices at the margins of education systems, it seeks to surface insights that are often overlooked in more stable contexts and to amplify perspectives that are less visible in dominant policy and research narratives. In doing so, it also aims to shift the framing of educational provision from a logic of institutional interest toward a logic of user need and long-term resilience.

The expected outcome is a conceptual framework that organises effective practices into four dimensions: Relevance, Openness, Independence, and Pluralism. This framework will synthesise findings from across contexts to identify transferable strategies for designing open education systems that are adaptable, scalable, and equity-oriented. Ultimately, the research aims to demonstrate how insights from emergency contexts can inform more robust and inclusive open education ecosystems globally.

Speakers

Adriana D’Amico

Education Policy Student - Intern Researcher @ Monash Virtual School, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona

Adriana D’Amico is a postgraduate student currently enrolled in an Erasmus Mundus Master program on education policies for global development. During her bachelor in Economics and social sciences she took part in advocacy activities, working with a team to promote pluralism in economics... Read More →

Wednesday October 7, 2026 4:20pm - 4:50pm EDT
5 - Dining Room 3 - 6th Floor MIT Samberg Conference Center, 50 Memorial Drive, Cambridge MA 02139 USA

Presentation

Speaker Modality In-person
Track Hacking the Open Ecosystem and Praxis for the Public Good

4:55pm EDT

How Open Is a University? A Framework for Comparison

Wednesday October 7, 2026 4:55pm - 5:25pm EDT

5 - Dining Room 3 - 6th Floor

ID: 34812

In 2024, the State Distance University of Costa Rica added the word “open” to its institutional description, a change that carries numerous implications that are not always clear to those both inside and outside the institution.

At the end of that year, we have the incredible opportunity to be part of a publication called the Handbook of Open Universities Around the World—the only university in Central America to participate—and this experience allows us to analyze just how open the UNED of Costa Rica really is.

Furthermore, this Handbook “provides rich analytical perspectives on the status and challenges of single-mode distance learning universities as an educational phenomenon while unpacking the premise of ‘openness’ itself.” (Mishra, Sanjaya & Panda, Santosh, 2025).

Analyzing how openness manifests itself across 47 universities worldwide from various fields and perspectives provides us with numerous experiences, best practices, methodologies, and procedures that will ultimately allow us to improve our open practices in areas as diverse as: “business models and finances, operations, instructional systems, enrollment patterns, learner support, quality assurance, professional development, and others.” (Mishra, Sanjaya & Panda, Santosh, 2025).

This is why we wish to share UNED’s experience in analyzing its openness within the framework proposed by the editors.

Speakers

Diana Hernández Montoya

Coordinator of the Fabrication Laboratory and OER Hub, Universidad Estatal a Distancia de Costa Rica

Diana is a teacher focused on human talent, innovation, and technology. Currently works doing research and is the coordinator of the Fabrication Laboratory (Fab Lab) of the Universidad Estatal a Distancia. She has degrees in preschool and primary education, educational technology... Read More →

Ana María Sandoval Poveda

Member of the Fabrication Laboratory and OER Hub, Universidad Estatal a Distancia de Costa Rica

Mathematician, educator, editor, and makerAna María is an academic producer and researcher at the Kä Träre Fabrication Laboratory. She received her professional training at the University of Costa Rica (UCR), in the School of Teacher Education (Faculty of Education) and the School... Read More →

Wednesday October 7, 2026 4:55pm - 5:25pm EDT
5 - Dining Room 3 - 6th Floor MIT Samberg Conference Center, 50 Memorial Drive, Cambridge MA 02139 USA

Presentation

Speaker Modality Hybrid
Track (Re)Inventing our Shared Global Vision Together

4:55pm EDT

OER: The Twelfth High Impact Practice

Wednesday October 7, 2026 4:55pm - 5:25pm EDT

7 - Dining Room 5 - 6th Floor

ID: 33896

At the culmination of a two-year, multi-institutional study that included almost 700,000 student records for analysis, AAC&U has added OER to its list of High Impact Practices (HIPs). HIPs are well-established practices that lead to positive student outcomes, namely for students historically underserved in higher education.

It is our hope that in naming OER as a HIP, institutional leaders will pay attention to the positive impacts OER can bring to their campuses and organize to institutionalize OER in new and exciting ways. We seek to advance movement on UN Sustainability Goal 4: Quality Education to ensure all learners have access to quality learning materials.

In this presentation, we will summarize the key findings of our study, focusing on course withdrawal rates, course grades, and time to completion. We found that context matters very much in predicting the rate of withdrawal in courses with OER, but in most cases, withdrawal rates were lower in courses that used OER, especially at doctoral institutions, and we note key differences in withdrawal rates when OER are merely adopted versus revised, remixed, or created.

Most notably, in regards to course grades, the number of A’s increased in every context where OER were used versus not. We also noted decreases in the time to credential, especially at community colleges for students that took more than four years to finish their credential–for students that took 6 or more OER courses during their course of study, they finished their credentials on average almost a year faster than those that took zero OER courses.

Additionally we will highlight findings from our instructor survey, representing the voices of over 200 individual instructors that transitioned to OER over the course of the study period. The survey captured their motivations and experiences in implementation, as well as their perceptions on how well their OER implementation went based on those motivations and support structures. We also examined how teaching practices changed after using OER.

We will also provide recommendations for leveraging OER as a HIP on your campuses to advance OER initiatives and programs as an equity strategy to help all students, but especially those that have been historically underserved by higher education.

AAC&U as an organization advocates to democratize higher education as a public good, and the addition of OER to the current list of HIPs is a strategic choice to support OER in higher education as not only an affordability strategy for students, but to help students persist and succeed in their education.

Speakers

C. Edward Watson

Vice President for Digital Innovation, American Association of Colleges & Universities

Dr. C. Edward Watson is the Vice President for Digital Innovation. He provides leadership for the association’s national and state-level advocacy to advance quality in undergraduate student learning. This includes programming and a scholarly agenda that focuses on general education... Read More →

Jessica Chittum

Assistant Vice President for Curricular and Pedagogical Innovation and Director of VALUE Operations, American Association of Colleges & Universities

Jessica Chittum, PhD, is the Assistant Vice President for Curricular and Pedagogical Innovation and Director of VALUE Operations in the Office of Curricular, Pedagogical, and Digital Innovation (OCPDI) at AAC&U. In this role, Jessica engages in project management, research, professional... Read More →

Heather Miceli

Postdoctoral Research Fellow, American Association of Colleges & Universities

Heather Miceli is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at AAC&U in the Office of Curricular, Pedagogical, and Digital Innovation. Her current work at AAC&U is focused on OER adoption as an equity strategy for student success. She has over 15 years of teaching experience, all as contingent... Read More →

Beth Perkins

Assistant Director for Research and Assessment, American Association of Colleges & Universities

Beth Perkins, PhD, is the Assistant Director for Research and Assessment in the Office of Curricular, Pedagogical, and Digital Innovation at AAC&U. She provides methodological, analytical, logistical, and implementation support to the AAC&U VALUE Scoring Collaborative. In addition... Read More →

Wednesday October 7, 2026 4:55pm - 5:25pm EDT
7 - Dining Room 5 - 6th Floor MIT Samberg Conference Center, 50 Memorial Drive, Cambridge MA 02139 USA

Presentation

Speaker Modality Hybrid
Track (Re)Inventing our Shared Global Vision Together

4:55pm EDT

The Seven-Year Evolution of a Z-Course Boot Camp

Wednesday October 7, 2026 4:55pm - 5:25pm EDT

6 - Dining Room 4 - 6th Floor

ID: 33944

Since 2019, the Open Educational Resources Committee at Fort Hays State University (FHSU) has offered an annual Z-Course Boot Camp event to teach faculty interested in converting to zero-cost course materials about reasons to consider switching, project management, copyright and licensing, OER authoring tools, accessibility, (more recently) generative artificial intelligence, and publishing and sharing.

The boot camp is taught by a combination of librarians and instructional designers and is aimed primarily at faculty who have received a Z-Course Grant to convert their course to use zero-cost course materials, although it is open to all faculty.

This session discusses the evolution of the boot camp through several formats, from a two-day in-person event, to a synchronous Zoom event, to a one-day event, to its current form as an asynchronous course offered in Blackboard Ultra, FHSU’s LMS. The boot camp has always had a strong emphasis on feedback and revision.

In its asynchronous form, the camp begins with a welcome module that introduces participants to resources available to support OER work at the institutional and state level and provides a syllabus and list of relevant terminology. Each module contains readings and/or videos, a discussion requiring participants to apply and share new knowledge and skills, and a brief survey to capture participants’ feedback and suggestions for how the module could be improved.

The camp ends with a final survey and a certificate for participants who complete it. We are currently on the second iteration of the asynchronous boot camp and expect to continue to update it iteratively every year.

The current iteration contains the following modules:

Why Open, which contains testimonial videos from faculty and readings about student needs and behaviors around course material costs

Project Management, which contains a worksheet walking participants through searching for existing OERs, readings and videos about textbook structure and elements and textbook mapping for revision projects, and an exercise in which students review an existing textbook

Accessibility, which talks about current regulations and best practices and includes a reflection and persona exercise

AI and OER, which is currently fairly minimal, with a single reading and a discussion about concerns and opportunities

Copyright and Licensing, which contains readings about evaluating copyright, requesting permission to use student work, and finding free-to-use media

Authoring Tools, which contains a comparison between Pressbooks and Libretexts (the two OER authoring platforms for which FHSU provides support) and instructional videos on how to use both

Publishing and Sharing, which discusses how to implement peer review, add metadata, publish, print on demand, and promote new open resources within the OER and scholarly communities

Speakers

Claire Nickerson

Associate Professor and Open Initiatives Librarian, Fort Hays State University

Claire Nickerson is an associate professor and the Open Initiatives Librarian at Fort Hays State University (FHSU) in Kansas. She also sits on Open Up Learning Kansas, the statewide OER steering committee for the Kansas Board of Regents (KBOR). At FHSU, she chairs the institutional... Read More →

Wednesday October 7, 2026 4:55pm - 5:25pm EDT
6 - Dining Room 4 - 6th Floor MIT Samberg Conference Center, 50 Memorial Drive, Cambridge MA 02139 USA

Presentation

Speaker Modality In-person
Track Innovating Open Content to Democratize Knowledge

5:30pm EDT

Beyond the PDF: Finding and Remixing Living OER with the Pressbooks Directory

Wednesday October 7, 2026 5:30pm - 6:00pm EDT

5 - Dining Room 3 - 6th Floor

ID: 31580

Educators around the world are hungry for open educational resources, but too often what they find are static PDFs locked behind clunky repositories, difficult to discover and even harder to adapt. The Pressbooks Directory represents a fundamentally different kind of OER repository: a free, open, and searchable collection of over 8,500 open access books, built not just to be read, but to be remixed, localized, and made your own.

This hands-on session will introduce participants to the Pressbooks Directory as a discovery and adaptation platform that goes well beyond traditional static repositories to offer rich, interactive, and genuinely reusable content. Unlike PDF-based repositories that can feel like a dead end once downloaded, the Pressbooks Directory surfaces books that are alive: structured into chapters, embedded with H5P interactive activities, and filterable by license, subject area, interactivity level, and contributing institution.

Whether you're an instructor building a course in sociology, a librarian curating resources for an allied health program, or an instructional designer looking to scaffold learning in a second language context, the Directory gives you the tools to find what you need. Critically for a global audience, the Directory empowers localization. Participants will see examples of how educators have adapted content for specific national contexts, and other instances of tailoring resources to their learners.

This session directly addresses one of the most persistent barriers in open education: discoverability and reusability. Where many national and institutional repositories remain siloed, metadata-poor, and technically inaccessible to non-specialists, the Pressbooks Directory offers a community-powered alternative spanning hundreds of institutions worldwide. And with new texts being added every day, the collection grows continuously — a living ecosystem rather than a static archive.

Participants will leave this session knowing how to search and filter the Directory to find high-quality, openly licensed content; how to evaluate books for adaptability based on license type, interactivity, and structure; and how to begin remixing that content immediately using Pressbooks' built-in tools. Pressbooks’ built in cloning tool makes it incredibly easy for educators to adapt content to fit their needs.

In a landscape where digital infrastructure remains fragmented and individual educators often carry the weight of OER adoption with limited institutional support, the Directory lowers the barrier to meaningful adaptation — not just downloading, but genuinely remixing content to fit local languages, curricula, and contexts.

No prior experience with Pressbooks is required. Whether you are brand new to OER or a seasoned open practitioner looking to discover a powerful new repository, this session offers practical, immediately applicable skills for finding and building with open content at scale.

Speakers

John McLeod

Sales Team Lead, Pressbooks

John McLeod, Sales Team Lead, brings over four decades of experience in higher education. From his early days supporting students at the University of Alberta Bookstore to his current role guiding institutions through the evaluation and adoption of Pressbooks, John plays a vital role... Read More →

Wednesday October 7, 2026 5:30pm - 6:00pm EDT
5 - Dining Room 3 - 6th Floor MIT Samberg Conference Center, 50 Memorial Drive, Cambridge MA 02139 USA

Presentation

Speaker Modality In-person
Track (Re)Inventing our Shared Global Vision Together

5:30pm EDT

Measuring Student Perceptions of Open Educational Practices in a Co-Created Course

Wednesday October 7, 2026 5:30pm - 6:00pm EDT

6 - Dining Room 4 - 6th Floor

ID: 33803

This session shares findings from a mixed-methods research study examining how students’ awareness, attitudes, and engagement with Open Educational Practices (OEP) shift over the course of a semester in a higher education setting. The study is grounded in an undergraduate course on Open Educational Practices at a Canadian university, where students engaged with key concepts such as Open Educational Resources (OER), open pedagogy, Creative Commons licensing, remixing, co-creation, learner agency, accessibility, and social justice.

The course itself was intentionally designed as a co-created learning environment, inviting students to contribute to shared knowledge building and reflect on the role of openness in their emerging professional practice.

This session addresses how students experience and interpret openness when they are not only introduced to open concepts, but also invited to participate in open practices. The research asks how student awareness of OEP changes across a semester, what benefits and challenges students identify, how willing they are to engage in open practices in the future, and what factors appear to shape positive or negative shifts in their perceptions.

The study uses a pre- and post-course design that includes surveys, reflective writing, and optional follow-up interviews. Survey items explore familiarity with OEP and OER, perceived quality and usefulness, confidence, willingness to share or co-create materials openly, and views on accessibility, equity, and institutional support. Reflection and interview data add depth by highlighting how students make meaning of openness in relation to their lived experiences, academic identities, and future educational or professional contexts.

In this session, attendees will be introduced to the course and research design, invited to consider key themes emerging from the data, and encouraged to reflect on what these findings suggest for open course design and student engagement. Attention will be given to the pedagogical and ethical implications of asking students to move from consumers of knowledge to contributors within open learning environments.

Attendees will leave with practical insights for designing or revising courses that introduce OEP in meaningful, learner-centred ways. This session will be especially relevant for educators, educational developers, researchers, and open education advocates interested in understanding how students perceive openness, what supports deeper engagement, and how open education can be enacted in ways that are participatory, reflective, and socially responsive.

Speakers

Brandon Carson

Sessional Instructor and Research Associate, Ontario Tech University

Brandon Carson is an open education scholar-practitioner whose work sits at the intersection of teaching and learning, educational technology, and higher education change. With more than 17 years of experience in the post-secondary sector, Brandon has supported initiatives related... Read More →

Wednesday October 7, 2026 5:30pm - 6:00pm EDT
6 - Dining Room 4 - 6th Floor MIT Samberg Conference Center, 50 Memorial Drive, Cambridge MA 02139 USA

Presentation

Speaker Modality In-person
Track Innovating Open Content to Democratize Knowledge

OEGlobal 2026

From $195.00

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