ID: 33124
In 2024, OEG recognized the Open for Antiracism Program as an outstanding program for inclusive excellence. In moving OFAR beyond its base in California, what does it look like when open education for equity moves to other US and global contexts?
This panel presents the Open for Antiracism (OFAR) Toolkit—a collaborative, openly licensed resource rooted in five years of program data from the California Community College system—as a living prototype for how the open education community can collectively advance UNESCO Sustainable Development Goal 4: inclusive and equitable quality education for all.
OFAR began as professional development to help educators examine the relationship between OER, open pedagogy, and educational equity. The OFAR Toolkit extends that work into a freely adaptable Canvas Commons course to assist educators, institutions, and administrators in adapting our research-backed model for their own communities and contexts. The Toolkit is designed to resist one-size-fits-all definitions of equity—because equity looks different depending on the place, institution, and individual.
This session features an OFAR coach who has guided educators through the program's community-of-practice model; two adapters localizing OFAR for distinct contexts; and the project's leadership team. Together, panelists will share what OFAR has accomplished, what it cannot accomplish alone, and how open collaboration is reinventing its possibilities via the Toolkit.
Session Structure
The panel has four segments:
- the project leadership introduces OFAR's five-year research base, outcomes data, and core design principles;
- Our lead coach discusses the community-of-learners model at the program's core: how cohort structures, mentorship, and sustained professional relationships create conditions for genuine pedagogical transformation—and what requires local roots to replicate;
- Two adapters share how they are localizing the Toolkit for their own educational communities: what they changed, what they kept, and what tensions arose between the Toolkit's assumptions and their own contexts. They speak directly to the SDG 4 challenge of building equity frameworks across borders without imposing them; and
- The session closes with structured audience dialogue. Attendees are invited to reflect: What terms, practices, or structures would you change? What does equity-centered open pedagogy look like where you are? What can we build together that none of us can build alone?
This segment draws on the Toolkit's "Room to Grow" framework, modeling the reflective and collaborative spirit the resource is designed to cultivate.
