Name: Who Maintains the Commons? A Hybrid Panel on Hacking OER for Shared Stewardship
Start: 2026-10-09T11:50:00-0400
End: 2026-10-09T12:55:00-0400

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

Who Maintains the Commons? A Hybrid Panel on Hacking OER for Shared Stewardship

Friday October 9, 2026 11:50am - 12:55pm EDT

7 DR5

ID: 33906

If open educational resources are to serve the public good in fields where knowledge shifts from semester to semester, we must stop treating them like books and start treating them as commons that require ongoing care. This hybrid panel brings together OER authors, administrators, and platform developers to hash out what it would actually take to build infrastructures for shared maintenance and governance—economically, technologically, and culturally. Our starting provocation comes from recently published work on OER as dynamic digital commons (Daly, Ahmad, & Schneider, 2026). The panel uses that work as a shared reference point, but panelists will bring their own experiences to bear from authoring, administering, and building the tools that hold OER together.Three clusters of questions will structure the conversation. First, on economic flows: why does funding still stop at creation and one-way adoption, and what would it look like for grants, consortial dues, or platforms like Open Collective to sustain maintenance labor over years rather than weeks? Second, on technology: current OER platforms are designed for publication and adaptation rather than collaboration, lacking the version control, upstream contribution, and contributor identification features that open source communities rely on. What would it take for platforms to integrate these affordances without losing the accessibility that has made tools like Pressbooks successful? Third, on culture: how do we shift adopter expectations from passive reading to active participation, and what role should governance documents inside OER themselves play in signaling that shift?Audience engagement is central to the session design. After brief opening positions from each panelist (roughly fifteen minutes total), the moderator will open the floor using a hybrid-friendly format that blends live microphone questions with a shared online document and chat channel, so that in-person and remote attendees contribute on equal footing. We will pose two or three targeted prompts to the audience, for example, asking participants to name one maintenance obstacle they have encountered in their own work, and feed responses back into the panel discussion live.By the end of the session, attendees will have heard multiple grounded perspectives on challenges to OER maintenance, a working vocabulary for discussing OER as dynamic digital commons, and a short list of concrete next steps they can bring back to their own institutions, platforms, and funding bodies.

Speakers

Nathan Schneider

Associate Professor, Department of Media Studies, University of Colorado Boulder

Nathan Schneider is an associate professor of media studies at the University of Colorado Boulder, where he leads the Media Economies Design Lab and the MA program in Media and Public Engagement. He is the author of four books, most recently Governable Spaces: Democratic Design for... Read More →

Cheryl Casey

Open Education Librarian, University of Arizona

Cheryl Casey has led OER initiatives at the University of Arizona since 2014. She’s active in the OER community as a trainer for the Open Education Network (OEN) and one of the instructors for the OEN's Certificate in Open Education Librarianship. She holds a a Master’s in Library... Read More →

Diana Daly

Associate Professor and Associate Dean of Academic Affairs, College of Information Science, University of Arizona

Dr. Diana Daly has authored open educational resources including Humans R Social Media and Decoding Deception, and a scholar in information science focused on literacies in new media technologies including artificial intelligence, and on information trust, misinformation, and information... Read More →

Amanda Coolidge

VP, Strategic Engagement and Growth, Pressbooks

Amanda Coolidge is VP of Strategic Engagement and Growth at Pressbooks, where she leads marketing, sales, and customer success and serves as product manager for the company's microcredential platform. She is the founder of Coolidge Collaborative and former Executive Director of BCcampus... Read More →

Nancy A. Henke

Open Education Librarian, University of Colorado Denver

Nancy A. Henke is the Open Education Librarian at the University of Colorado Denver where she works to advance initiatives related to Zero Textbook Cost (ZTC) and Open Educational Resources (OER). She earned her degree in Library and Information Science from the University of Iowa... Read More →

Friday October 9, 2026 11:50am - 12:55pm EDT
7 DR5 MIT Samberg Conference Center, 50 Memorial Drive, Cambridge MA 02139 USA

Panel

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

Tickets

Success you have shared X tickets.

OEGlobal 2026

Nathan Schneider

Cheryl Casey

Diana Daly

Amanda Coolidge

Nancy A. Henke

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Success you have shared X tickets.

OEGlobal 2026

Nathan Schneider

Cheryl Casey

Diana Daly

Amanda Coolidge

Nancy A. Henke

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