2026 Open Education Conference

Open education often emphasizes digital access and sharing, but I’ve been thinking more about the relationships that actually make openness possible. In this session, I reflect on a community Pow Wow hosted at Cambrian College as an example of “another kind of open.”

As someone working in reconciliation education, I’ve come to see the Pow Wow as more than an event. It’s a space where learning happens through connection, respect, and reciprocity, a space where social justice and intercultural exchange are lived and felt. I see Indigenous pride and allyship in action. Helpers each play a unique role in creating an inclusive space rooted in Anishinaabe culture.

The Pow Wow encourages me to question the idea that openness is primarily digital, and to think about how the ethos of open education lives in relationships and community practices. I’ll invite attendees to reflect on how these observations might influence their own work and understanding of openness beyond the screen.

Attendees of this session will be able to:

• Describe how a community Pow Wow can function as a site of relational learning and “another kind of open”.
• Reflect on how relationships, roles, and responsibilities shape meaningful open practices.
• Identify ways that openness can extend beyond digital spaces into community-based contexts.
• Consider how reconciliation education, allyship, and Indigenous-led spaces can inform their understanding of open education.
• Apply insights from this session to re-think their own approaches to openness in their teaching or work.

While open educational practices (OEP) have shaped countless classrooms in higher education, K-12, and beyond, these ideas are largely unheard of in the world of organized labour. This session presents a metatheoretical model suggesting that the scholarly processes that proliferate OEP in formal academic settings are predominantly disconnected from organized labour, yet there are existing channels to bridge the connections. The model employs a systems thinking framework with two main subsystems. First, is the prospect for OEP in union education settings. For example, in Joint Health and Safety Committee certification training programs, there are numerous OEPs that have the potential to enhance engagement and inclusion. The second subsystem comprises open labour practices (OLP), which are practices with concepts similar to OEP such as renewable content. Renewable union reports will be discussed as a manifestation of OLP with a case study of the Canadian Union of Public Employees.

Attendees of this session will be able to:

• Understand the metatheoretical model explaining why OEP practitioners are primarily present in higher education settings and absent from union education settings.
• Understand the ways that OEP can be applied to union education settings such as the Canadian Union of Public Employees.
• Understand the way that open labour practices (OLP) can facilitate advocacy for wider adoption of OEP in union settings.
• Understand the channels by which unions in higher education settings can catalyse exchange of such ideas to the broader movement of organized labour beyond academia.

Course marking refers to a practice in which institutions provide information to students during course registration about which courses use free, low cost, and/or open course materials. Course marking has become an important topic in higher education as institutions seek to improve the affordability of course materials for their students, as a means of supporting student success. I conducted a national survey examining course marking practices at post-secondary institutions in Canada. In this presentation, I will share the survey results, including an analysis of how frequent course marking is at universities and colleges in Canada. I will use responses from institutions already engaged in course marking to determine the units, processes, and systems involved. I will also describe trends at Canadian institutions that are not yet engaged in course marking, and whether this is a program that is being considered to foster transparency and affordability in course materials costs.

Attendees of this session will be able to:

• Identify motivations for marking courses that use free, low-cost, or open course materials.
• Recognize trends in course marking at Canadian institutions.
• Describe the units, processes, and systems involved in course marking at Canadian post-secondary institutions.

The space between open education (OE) and knowledge mobilization (KMb) is rich with possibilities. It has been overlooked despite shared values and complementary practices. Both OE and KMb seek to extend the use of knowledge and cultivate meaningful engagement beyond traditional scholarly audiences, particularly through co-creation. As we continue to look for ways to integrate OE in institutional practices and policies, KMb offers a meaningful opportunity to think about “educational” as a broader function that includes the dissemination and application of research findings.

While OER advocates may already be aware of overlaps between OE and KMb, this presentation is an invitation to combine the vocabulary of both fields to frame OER creation in ways that resonate with researchers, administrators, and leaders, positioning open educational practices as directly connected to institutional priorities such as research impact, community engagement, and innovation.

Attendees of this session will be able to:

• Identify the shared values and practices of open education and knowledge mobilization.
• Explain how OER creation can be framed as a knowledge mobilization activity that aligns with institutional priorities.
• Reflect on strategies to position OER production as a recognized, valued scholarly activity within research-intensive universities.

Educators new to open education are often already stretched. Approaching them with new practices to adopt risks positioning open education as one more demand rather than a useful strategy.

This session introduces a different approach to open education professional development: folio thinking, a reflective practice framework that centres personal meaning-making. Rather than beginning with skills, the Open Education Workbook (KPU) invites educators to connect open education principles to their own values and teaching context throughout. The result: open education becomes a practical strategy for acting on values educators already hold, rather than a new set of demands.

The workbook is available on PebblePad (with optional ATLAS facilitator support) and as an openly licensed Pressbooks resource for adaptation.

Attendees of this session will be able to:

• Describe how a values-first, folio thinking approach to open education development works — and how anchoring learning in the principles of accessible, effective, and equitable teaching can lower barriers for educators new to open education.
• Determine whether and how a values-first approach to open education development might apply in their own institutional context.
• Focus on topics that align with their own open education journey, applying open educational concepts directly to their teaching context.

When public institutions work together and pool resources to address common curriculum and educational technology needs, there are many benefits. These collaborative projects can leverage collective expertise, generate efficiencies, and distribute workload and costs. This session looks at the findings from a two-year initiative in British Columbia, Canada, that investigated models and mechanisms for enabling this kind of institutional collaboration. We will explore key things that foster and sustain collaborative ventures as well as the structural barriers, and make a case for investing in open approaches on a system level, including open communities, technologies, content, and infrastructure.

Attendees of this session will be able to:

• Describe the benefits of institutions working together on shared curriculum and technology projects.
• Define sustainment and describe considerations that play into sustaining collaborative projects, including open projects.
• Explain the benefits of open from a system point of view.
• Draw upon the lessons learned by existing collaborative initiatives.

As post-secondary institutions increasingly emphasize impact and open scholarship/science initiatives, OER publishing programs can consider strategic alignment across collective, local, and institutional spaces. This presentation examines the evolution of an OER publishing program’s support resources developed to support a grassroots consortium of representatives with their own local institutional programs, while also coordinating shared provincial practices and workflows. With organizational changes and new opportunities for creators, we explore how OER workflows and resources have aligned with research and institutional priorities through an Open Education Alberta Institutional Representative Toolkit for launching or reframing OER publishing aligned with centralized workflows while enabling flexible local implementation. It offers practical insights for OER publishing services navigating evolving priorities, and connections to research and education for OER creators.

Attendees of this session will be able to:

• Consider, adopt, or adapt components of the Open Education Alberta Institutional Representative Toolkit to support or evolve their own local OER publishing services.
• Understand the service model and shared workflows of Open Education Alberta’s Pressbooks-hosted OER publishing program, including how centralized infrastructure supports locally implemented services.
• Reflect on navigating these interconnected spaces between and within education, research, and institutional priorities for OER publishing as service support staff and as creators.

This session will provide an overview of the BCcampus Open GenAI project. This 3-year project is funded by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. The goal of this project is to create an open GenAI study companion prototype (Opterna) and to build the capacity of post-secondary educators in B.C. with respect to open.

The creation of Opterna was guided by the design principles of collaboration, open pedagogy, inclusivity and equity, learner empowerment, and ethical criticality. It was informed by several open frameworks including the traditional 5R permissions of OER (Wiley, (2014), Sinkinson’s (2018) , Jhangiani’s (2019), Clarke-Gray’s (2025), and Hegarty’s (2015)) . Opterna utilizes Amazon Web Services (AWS) and uses the B.C. Open Collection corpus. It was designed for use by instructors and students in support of student learning.

This presentation will speak to the design considerations and introduce the draft framework for ethical AI, and an overview of Opterna.

Attendees of this session will be able to:

• Describe the goals for the BCcampus Open GenAI project.
• Examine the functional Opterna prototype.
• Identify opportunities and challenges of working with open GenAI in teaching and learning.
• Describe ethical considerations for using open GenAI tools.
• Explore how to use open GenAI with open educational resources.