Name: Building the Next Generation of Open Educators: Open Textbooks, Networks and Conversations for the Future
Start: 2026-10-08T15:35:00-0400
End: 2026-10-08T16:05:00-0400

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

Building the Next Generation of Open Educators: Open Textbooks, Networks and Conversations for the Future

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

7 DR5

ID: 33737

The #RhodesMustFall student protests of 2015 highlighted the alienation that students in South Africa experience at universities whose colonial origins still dominate institutional culture, resulting in societal and institutional injustices that make it challenging for students to transition to university (Luckett and Shay, 2017). Ten years on, despite a variety of institutional responses to address the issues, transformation is still a work in progress. Open education is considered a global response to address social injustices in Higher education (HE) such as lack of access to quality, localized, relevant teaching and learning materials. Interviews with open textbook authors and student co-creators have shown the authoring process enabled pedagogical change, collaboration with multiple authors and students (Cox et al. 2024).Student voice was amplified and acknowledged during the protests. The inclusion of student voice can continue to bring about transformation and is essential for shaping conversations about the future of HE considering students are embedded in their lived realities and are uniquely placed to understand the needs of their communities. This presentation will address the question: How do we partner with students in OER authoring and bring students into conversation about open education and the future of higher education?There is a growing body of literature describing student partnership but previous work has not included student recognition for co-creating curricula and course materials and how to bring students into conversation with open education practitioners. This presentation will introduce students as partner models and specifically relate them to openness. Three examples of partnership will be introduced, a University of Cape Town pilot project: student fellowships in Digital Open Textbooks for Development. An exciting example of student authorship process in open textbook production “Science is tough but so are you” (Willmers et al. in press). The UNITWIN network of Open Education (UNOE) will be described, including its objectives. The important new and different approach of UNOE has been to begin its collaborative multi-national work with a project enabling student voice.Interviews were carried out with academic authors and students. Students also wrote their own reflections on their experiences. The current UNOE student fellowships project will include outputs and documents collected during the process and reflections of the student co-ordinator responsible for growing the student network. Student fellowships at UCT highlighted the strong student voice concerned with issues of social justice and building sharing resources into future HE systems. The findings from interviews revealed the power of open textbook initiatives to serve as vehicles for promote multilingualism, ‘localisation’ (including translation), epistemic representation and institutional change (Masuku et al. 2025). This presentation highlights a pathway for Open Education sustainability, renewed focus on epistemic justice through open education and students as partners. This research and practice has implication for democratising knowledge, authoring content for specific contexts and circumstance. UNESCO student fellows project if designed to build an open community of academics and students who can support and guide new types of content, knowledge and network for sustainable open education with the aim of addressing epistemic injustice.

Speakers

Glenda Cox

Building the next generation of open educators: open textbooks, networks and conversations for the future., University of Cape Town

Associate Professor Glenda Cox works in the Centre for Innovation in Learning and Teaching (CILT) at the University of Cape Town (UCT). She leads the Digital Open Textbooks for Development (DOT4D) initiative at UCT. She holds the UNESCO chair in Open Education and Social Justice and... Read More →