Name: From Classrooms to Careers: Equipping Today’s Students with the Workforce Skills of Tomorrow Through OER
Start: 2026-10-07T15:35:00-0400
End: 2026-10-07T16:05:00-0400

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

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 Room M

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 Room M MIT Samberg Conference Center, 50 Memorial Drive, Cambridge MA 02139 USA

Presentation

Speaker Modality Hybrid
Track Innovating Open Content to Democratize Knowledge

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OEGlobal 2026

Lindsay Josephs

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OEGlobal 2026

Lindsay Josephs

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