2026 Open Education Conference

As generative AI disrupts traditional assumptions about student writing, many instructors have responded with increased control and surveillance. This session argues for an alternative solution grounded in open education and assessment literacy. Drawing on a redesign of an ENG101 course, the presentation explores a shift from teaching essay writing as a product to using essays as representations of critical thinking within a transparent assessment framework. The session highlights a critical gap in higher education: limited faculty preparation in designing valid and reliable instruments for measuring learning. By clarifying learning constructs, aligning assignments with evidence claims, and openly sharing rubrics and criteria, this approach improves transparency, equity, and instructional coherence. The session positions open assessment as a necessary evolution of open education and a pedagogically sound response to AI.

Attendees of this session will be able to:

• Explain why traditional essay-based assessments often produce invalid or unreliable inferences about student critical thinking, especially in AI-mediated learning environments.
• Identify the key components of an open assessment framework, including construct definition, evidence alignment, and transparent criteria.
• Describe how open education principles—such as transparency, shared practice, and learner agency—apply to the design of assessments, not just course materials.
• Recognize common misconceptions about measuring learning (e.g., equating product quality with cognitive processes) and how these misconceptions contribute to inequity.
• Articulate how openly shared rubrics, prompts, and assessment criteria can improve instructional coherence and support AI-resilient, equity-centered teaching practices.

What does it take to launch and sustain an OER program? This session examines how five community colleges built OER programs from the ground up, with an honest look at the startup and ongoing costs involved. Drawing on a cross-institutional study, presenters will share cost estimates, common patterns, and key differences in how colleges allocated resources. We’ll explore startup ingredients, such as staffing models, faculty incentives, infrastructure investments, and institutional support. Whether you're in early planning stages or looking to expand an existing initiative, you'll leave with real-world examples and a clearer picture of what it actually takes to connect vision to launch.

Attendees of this session will be able to:

• Identify key cost factors involved in launching and sustaining an OER program.
• Compare case studies of how five community colleges structured and launched their OER programs to recognize common patterns and key differences that can contribute to wider OER adoption and program sustainability.
• Use evidence on OER's academic impact to inform implementation decisions at their institutions.

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.

For some, accessibility and the Title II requirements are a requirement that feels like an insurmountable feat. For others, accessibility is the window into stronger instructional design and along the way - connections to colleagues that inspire, connect and unite us. Open Education's tenants of inclusion, iteration and innovation have long driven advances in the Educational Technology world, but it's the opportunity to genuinely work together in small groups, finding new partners along that way that centers Open Ed colleagues as leaders in the accessibility movement. This panel will allow you to hear from and ask questions of people who are creating spaces for moving beyond compliance of Title II and into the space of creating genuinely accessible OER. This panel will spark your connections to other like-minded leaders who see Accessibility as a "how might we..." opportunity and lead to finding your own Accessibili-buddies.

Attendees of this session will be able to:

• Participants will receive an update on Accessibility Practices as related to OER.
• Participants will analyze example collaboration resources for building Accessibility Communities of Practice.
• Participants will reflect on their own questions about creating Accessible OER to consider next steps they might take.
• Participants will join a broader community of colleagues who are committed to Accessible OER.

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.

As more faculty adopt, adapt, and create OER, their work often outpaces institutional policies that formally recognize it. Many institutions still exclude OER from tenure, promotion, and review guidelines, creating a persistent “space between” meaningful practice and formal reward. In this gap, faculty must articulate the value of their OER contributions without consistent supporting evidence. While open education advocacy organizations offer guidance on describing OER work, less attention has been paid to documentation: what tangible evidence can faculty provide? This presentation addresses that need by sharing practical strategies OER program managers can implement to generate meaningful documentation of engagement with open education, including certificates, letters, usage data, and awards. Focusing on immediate, actionable approaches, this session helps make OER labor visible, support faculty recognition, and build momentum for broader institutional change.

Attendees of this session will be able to:

• Understand the gap between faculty OER practices and institutional evaluation policies and explain how the “space between” impacts recognition and reward structures.
• Explore different forms of documentation (e.g., certificates, letters, analytics, awards) that can be used to demonstrate faculty engagement in OER across adoption, adaptation, creation, and advocacy.
• Consider how documentation strategies can be applied to support faculty recognition within existing tenure, promotion, and review systems.

How can a Shakespeare course teach students to think critically about AI while also building AI literacy skills? This session shares Bardbot: Reading Shakespeare in the Age of AI, an openly licensed literature course built on a CC BY-NC Pressbooks textbook and open education resources. Shakespeare is not an arbitrary choice: his works are among the most overrepresented texts in any LLM training corpus—public domain, fully digitized, and surrounded by centuries of secondary criticism. That saturation makes AI outputs about Shakespeare a perfect test case for AI literacy training, offering students a familiar target for interrogating the false confidence of a model trained on SparkNotes. Attendees will leave with practical strategies for embedding AI literacy in open humanities courses without abandoning academic rigor. We will also explore strategies to support AI literacy without requiring AI tool use.

Attendees of this session will be able to:

• Apply at least two strategies for embedding AI literacy into existing open education courses without displacing core disciplinary learning goals.
• Distinguish between unreflective AI use and the "hybrid writing" model, and explain how transparent, bounded use can model ethical practice for students.
• Analyze why texts overrepresented in LLM training data (such as Shakespeare) create productive conditions for teaching critical evaluation of AI-generated analysis.
• Locate and adapt openly licensed course materials, including the Critical Worlds Pressbooks textbook, for use in a specific institutional context.
• Evaluate course design approaches that build AI literacy for students who choose not to use generative tools.

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.