OEGlobal 2026: Full Schedule

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

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3:00pm EDT

Fostering Creativity in Creative Commons: Empowering Communities to Remix Educational Resources

Thursday October 8, 2026 3:00pm - 3:30pm EDT

ID: 33989

How do you know whether people use your creative-commons-licensed educational resources? Library professionals often do the work of translating complex information into educational resources and engaging learning experiences for their communities to connect with each other, but do not always make time to document and share their resources broadly. Through human-centered approaches that invite playing together, elevating the creativity of library professionals and educators, and joyfully trying out others' ideas in different communities, the inspiration powered by the excitement to share resources can become an unstoppable force. To address the gap of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education for a wider audience, MIT Public Library Innovation Exchange (PLIX, plix.mit.edu) develops creative creative-commons-licensed STEAM ("A" adds the arts to STEM) learning resources and experiences based on MIT research and co-designed for the public library setting. With a reach of over 1,400 public library professionals across all 50 United States, and connections across 40 countries, PLIX programs support learners as 1) designers, rather than consumers, of technology, 2) creators, rather than recipients, of knowledge, and 3) scientists and artists, rather than one or the other. PLIX connects library professionals and MIT researchers to co-design learning experiences and develop and share facilitation practices to inspire engaging STEAM programming in public libraries. Drawing from a repository of 13 thoughtfully designed STEM activities, and over 70 adaptations created by the community for localized contexts, learners create, play, experiement with paper circuits, the sound of food, wearable data trackers, urban ecology, an arcade of offline games to learn AI FUNdamentals, and more. To encourage library professionals' confidence to offer high quality STEM learning experiences, PLIX offers 1) easy-entry free online STEAM workshops that provide space for hands-on practice, 2) multi-session facilitation training on creative STEAM pedagogy available in-person, online, and in a hybrid format, and 3) an annual ambassador program to bring together a cohort of library professionals to connect, collaborate, and inspire each other. (Across 4 iterations of the PLIX ambassador program, over 67 librarians continue to use and promote PLIX resources to their library peers.)In this round table, we joyfully share a showcase of PLIX CC-BY-NC-SA printable zines, the different pathways we use to promote their adaptation and use, and encourage attendees to collaboratively edit, cut, paste, and create their own adaptations about knowledge they are excited to share with the world.

Speakers

Ada Ren-Mitchell

Learning Programs Designer, MIT Public Library Innovation Exchange

Ada Ren-Mitchell is a Learning Programs Designer at the MIT Public Library Innovation Exchange (PLIX), where she designs cozy communities and creative STEAM learning experiences. Since 2014, her experiences encompass innovative education pedagogy, STEM research, community facilitation... Read More →

Thursday October 8, 2026 3:00pm - 3:30pm EDT
4 Room T MIT Samberg Conference Center, 50 Memorial Drive, Cambridge MA 02139 USA

Round Table

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

3:35pm EDT

Design Discomfort: The Friction Open Education Requires

Thursday October 8, 2026 3:35pm - 4:05pm EDT

4 Room T

ID: 33999

Open education has made extraordinary progress dismantling structural barriers to access. But access is not connection, and presence is not participation. As scholars like Audrey Watters have argued, the promises of open education have often defaulted toward scale and efficiency, optimizing for reach while leaving questions of depth, belonging, and relational learning underexplored. This roundtable asks participants to sit with a new provocation: what if the next step isn't more content, but more friction, the slow, relational work of learning together.Design Discomfort is a circulating research series operating across creative and innovative spaces: design studios, schools, and organizations. The research began as a direct response to AI: where AI aggregates anonymous, patterned, average, "scraped" knowledge at scale, Design Discomfort aggregates named, vulnerable, situated, face-to-face knowledge, asking what remains distinctly human about learning together. Participants gather to have both joyful conversations and the harder ones they tend to avoid, about job security, the role of technology, what education actually prepares you for, and what society needs now. No presentations. No panels. Just people in a room, making something together. Drawing on the facilitation traditions of Freire and bell hooks, the methodology is simple: discomfort invites vulnerability, vulnerability builds community, and community is what education urgently needs.This round table puts that methodology into practice. Rather than presenting findings, the facilitator will open the room with provocations adapted for the open education community, creating the conditions for the same kind of dialogue Design Discomfort generates elsewhere. The format embodies the argument: culture is produced between people, not stored inside them, and education's role isn't to decorate culture but to actively participate in producing it.Participants will engage with questions including: What does genuine community feel like inside open education and how do we build more of it? In a landscape defined increasingly by automation and scale, what do we risk losing if we don't design for vulnerability and human contact? Attendees will leave having experienced relational learning in practice, a transferable methodology for facilitating generative dialogue in their own institutions, and the reminder that education, at its best, has always been about what happens between people — not what gets delivered to them. The friction is the point.

Speakers

Cameron King

Vice President, Creative (and Grad Student), CASE Agency (and Vermont College of Fine Arts)

Cameron King is a designer, educator, and advocate for collaborative creative communities.His practice sits at the intersection of visual communication, design leadership, and creative culture. As VP of Creative at CASE, he partners with global brands, including e.l.f. Beauty, Disney... Read More →

Thursday October 8, 2026 3:35pm - 4:05pm EDT
4 Room T MIT Samberg Conference Center, 50 Memorial Drive, Cambridge MA 02139 USA

Round Table

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

4:20pm EDT

Make a Zine and Make Community

Thursday October 8, 2026 4:20pm - 4:50pm EDT

4 Room T

ID: 34010

During this round table session, participants will discuss reasons that we need support right now, and will learn how to make zines as one way to create community. Making things together (crafts, OER) can help us develop relationships, have fun, and feel a sense of accomplishment. We will discuss the ways that we might be able to find connection and hope through the values of open education. Working in higher education in the United States is especially difficult at this moment in history. Beyond the headline-grabbing threats and cancelled research funding, educators are still feeling effects from the pandemic lockdowns and altered teaching practices that began in 2020--2021. Many students today feel anxious and isolated, and have minimal coping skills to handle those feelings. Many have difficulty reading and comprehending written instructions, and some are so overwhelmed by the demands of what used to be a typical college semester that they just shut down or give up. I find this heartbreaking, frustrating, and exhausting. On top of that, I am part of a minority of faculty in my department who use open resources, which can cause a feeling of isolation. Using OER over time has led me to develop and articulate my values around education--especially public higher education--that go beyond “free is good for students” to include “education is a human right” and “my institution exists to serve the people who live in the region, whoever they are.” Sometimes I remix or create new open content, but in recent years the amount of extra work to take the materials from “class handouts” to “open resources that are proofread, formatted, licensed, posted, and publicized” has been beyond my capacity. That said, I have been able to find sources of resilience! I have found like-minded individuals within my institution. We have made changes to our classes that encourage hope and play and just talking to each other more. I attribute the latter to my decade-plus use of OER, which allowed me to decouple my teaching from the rigid structure of a commercial textbook. It has become a habit, now, to check my assumptions, figure out what my students’ needs are now, and then to find or make something that will meet those needs. Zines (from the word magazines) are 8-page booklets folded from a single sheet of letter-sized paper. The zine maker writes, draws, makes collages for each page. The zine can then be photocopied, folded, and distributed.I have used zines in classes as a way for students to engage with the course material in cognitive, affective, creative, and tactile ways that are different from what they usually do. Students summarize and create and imagine something new using what they have learned in class, and they enjoy it so much. Materials and examples will be provided.

Speakers

Elizabeth Siler

Professor, Worcester State University

Elizabeth Siler is a professor at Worcester State University in the Business Administration and Economics Department. She teaches management classes to undergraduate students and almost exclusively uses open education resources, and is an advisor for the Fiber Arts Circle student... Read More →

Thursday October 8, 2026 4:20pm - 4:50pm EDT
4 Room T MIT Samberg Conference Center, 50 Memorial Drive, Cambridge MA 02139 USA

Round Table

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

4:55pm EDT

Beyond Tech vs Content: Articulating the Public Interest in AI Policy:The Open Education Perspective

Thursday October 8, 2026 4:55pm - 5:25pm EDT

4 Room T

ID: 34027

Public debate continues to rage over AI policy - the economic, technical, and legal regulation of AI tool creation and use. These debates, however, reduce the interests down to a balancing of the interest and demands of the content industry with the interests and demands of the technology industry. Neither of those interests align particularly closely with the interests of users, and of public interest institutions including libraries, educational institutions, and the populations they serve.The members of the panel will discuss what issues define the public interest as distinct from both of these corporate interests - working from the experience of the open education community as both committed to the public interest and engaged with new technologies. We will cover interests including:Accessibility, universal design, and student agency - including the importance of users control and tool choiceTransparency and due process - focusing on the importance of disclosure when AI tools are used and a process for challenging AI determinations when they are made without meaningful reviewStudent surveillance, learning, and open pedagogy - preserving space for experimentation and learningInteroperability and portability - pushing back on platformization as a tool for extractive business models and content silosAgainst these concerns we will start with a discussion of choices at an instructor or an institutional level, but will also focus on building a public agenda for policy debates and lawmaking processes to enunciate the interests that are not currently well represented in the debate. We will engage with audience members to identify decision points in the selection, implementation, and use of AI in different teaching and learning contexts and to map the interests of users in specific cases. This session will build on previous work, including the “Policy Priorities for Generative AI and Open Education: A Report for the DOERS Community” as well as previous workshops within the open education community over the past four years. We hope this session will serve two parallel purposes: First we hope it prepares participants for discussions of AI implementation and policy that they are involved in at a classroom, department, institutional or system level. Second, we hope that active discussion, participation, and feedback from participants will shape our forward looking work on furthering the public interests in law and policy debates on AI regulation, licensing, and lawmaking. These goals are urgent - as policy decisions are being made we need a clear case for the interests of users, not just a bargain struck between two competing corporate interests. Members of the open community provide a valuable public interest perspective into this debate.

Speakers

William Cross

Director, Open Knowledge Center, North Carolina State University

Will Cross is a medium-sized pile of diplomas in a trench coat. He serves as the Director of the Open Knowledge Center at N.C. State University, an instructor at UNC Chapel Hill, and a Senior Policy Fellow at American University's Washington College of Law. Will holds a law degree... Read More →

Meredith Jacob

Director, Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property, American University Washington College of Law

Meredith Jacob is the director of the Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property at American University Washington College of Law. Currently her work includes research and advocacy focused on: open educational resources, open access to federally funded research, and... Read More →

Robin DeRosa

Executive Director, Open Education Network

Dr. Robin DeRosa is an educator and community leader who has served in many roles over the span of her career. She has been a middle school theater teacher, a high school literature and writing teacher, and a college professor of both English and Interdisciplinary Studies. She has... Read More →

Thursday October 8, 2026 4:55pm - 5:25pm EDT
4 Room T MIT Samberg Conference Center, 50 Memorial Drive, Cambridge MA 02139 USA

Round Table

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

5:30pm EDT

Who Gets Credit When AI Shares the Work? A Provenance Conversation

Thursday October 8, 2026 5:30pm - 6:00pm EDT

4 Room T

ID: 34030

When a student submits work that includes AI-generated text, adapted OER, and original writing, who made it? When a librarian publishes a course guide remixed from three openly licensed sources and refined with an AI tool, whose work is it? When an educator adapts a textbook chapter, runs it through a translation model, and posts it under CC BY, who does that license require you to credit?
These aren't hypothetical questions. They're happening in classrooms, libraries, and publishing workflows right now, and many of us are making up the answers as we go.
Attribution in open education has always been more aspiration than infrastructure. Creative Commons gives us TASL (Title, Author, Source, License) as a starting point, not a system, and the ground is shifting under even that starting point. The U.S. Copyright Office concluded in its January 2025 copyrightability report that AI-generated content without sufficient human authorship is not copyrightable, which means the "Author" field in TASL now carries questions it was never designed for. CC Signals, Creative Commons' emerging preference signals project, introduces credit obligations for machine reuse of openly licensed collections but operates at the dataset level, not per-work provenance tracking inside a content workflow. The gap between what we say we value and what we can trace keeps growing.
This round table is a conversation about what honest attribution looks like when humans and AI share the work.
We're bringing one proposed answer to the table: DARP (Devise, Author, Review, Prepare). DARP is a structured attribution model that assigns contributor roles, human or AI, across four stages of a content workflow, each with a defined scope of involvement. It tracks provenance as work is made, not reconstructed after the fact, and that record persists through remixing and redistribution without altering source text.
DARP is not theoretical. It is implemented in commonFrame, an open-source platform licensed under AGPL, with tooling available at no cost. But this conversation is not about the platform. It's about whether a model like DARP reflects how open educators actually work (and what's missing).
One question will anchor our time together: does a four-stage attribution model fit your practice, and where does it break? We especially want to hear from the open educators, open technologists, and open innovators at OEGlobal 2026 who remix, adapt, translate, and publish in open contexts every day. If the model doesn't fit your workflow, tell us why. If there's a stage we haven't accounted for, we want to know. If your context raises questions we haven't considered, we want to hear them.
Attribution is what keeps open education trustworthy and sustainable. This community has been working in open contexts longer than most, and that experience should shape what gets built next.

Speakers

Victoria Brame

Co-Founder, Clear Box

Victoria Brame is the co-founder of Clear Box, a mission-driven organization creating local-first, clear-box AI infrastructure so that access to knowledge never comes at the cost of privacy. She also leads strategic communications at The Rebus Foundation, expanding the reach of impactful... Read More →

Chris Macek

Co-Founder, Clear Box

Chris Macek is the co-founder of Clear Box, a mission-driven organization working to make public good software approachable and trustworthy. He leads development and designs systems that make it possible, a role that comes naturally after 20 years of doing the same thing in recording... Read More →

Thursday October 8, 2026 5:30pm - 6:00pm EDT
4 Room T MIT Samberg Conference Center, 50 Memorial Drive, Cambridge MA 02139 USA

Round Table