Name: Building the Open Education Association: A Framework for Field-Building
Start: 2026-10-08T13:40:00-0400
End: 2026-10-08T14:10:00-0400

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

Building the Open Education Association: A Framework for Field-Building

Thursday October 8, 2026 1:40pm - 2:10pm EDT

8 - Dining Room 6 - 6th Floor

ID: 33985

This session will walk through what it took to build the Open Education Association from the ground up, and what that process can offer to open education advocates looking to strengthen coordination in their own regions and contexts.

The Open Education Association is a newly founded national organization dedicated to strengthening and expanding the open education field across the United States. Rooted in the decades-strong open education community, it represents a national coordinating body shaped entirely by the people working within it. Its development began not with a formal plan, but with a conversation at the 2023 Open Education Conference, where practitioners reflected on what the field still needed to move forward collectively.

From there, SPARC, the four regional interstate higher education compacts, and DOERS co-hosted a national discussion series that examined the case for a national strategy. Those conversations pointed to a consistent theme: the field did not need a single program; it needed stronger coordination among existing efforts.

A subsequent needs assessment survey gathered input from more than 1,000 community members across all 50 states. The findings confirmed that the field was not lacking solutions. It was lacking the coordination to make those solutions visible and accessible to everyone who needed them.

Practitioners identified four priority areas where greater support was needed: finding OER, responding to political and technological change, securing funding, and accessing tools and resources. Just as telling, only 14% of respondents viewed the field as well-coordinated nationally, making the case for a national coordinating body clear.

The association responded to those findings by developing governance structures, a membership model, and a first-year programming agenda through a series of open working sessions with the broader community. That process required making real decisions about scope, priorities, and how to balance accessibility with sustainability. It also meant sitting with the tension of building something new while being careful not to duplicate the work that existing organizations were already doing well.

This session will present that development arc honestly, including what worked, what required pivoting, and what the association's early days have looked like in practice.

Every national context is unique, and this session is not intended to be prescriptive. Rather, it is an opportunity to share our process openly so that others can consider what may be relevant in their own context. For anyone considering coordinating infrastructure at any scale, this session offers frameworks and hard-won lessons in how to build something that reflects the needs of the people it is meant to serve.

Speakers

Nicole Allen

Director of Open Education / Executive Director, SPARC / Open Education Association

Nicole Allen is the Director of Open Education for SPARC and Executive Director of the Open Education Association. Nicole has dedicated her career to ensuring global access to knowledge and is an internationally recognized advocate for open education. She has been widely cited in... Read More →