2026 Open Education Conference

Access to research education remains uneven for medical students worldwide, limiting opportunities to develop essential skills and engage in research.

The International Federation of Medical Students’ Associations (IFMSA) addresses this gap through three Peer-Assisted Learning (PAL) research education workshops, guided by the Basic Research Competencies Framework (BRCF). This five-pillar structure shapes all educational content and is supported by a broader open educational ecosystem. This ecosystem includes openly licensed materials, manuals and agendas, compiled in centralized resource repositories, enabling National Member Organizations (NMOs) to replicate these workshops and activities independently.

In this session, attendees will explore how to assess, implement, and adapt open-access educational materials and frameworks in their institutions or networks, enabling them to expand access to research education, strengthen skill development, and drive collaborative learning worldwide

Attendees of this session will be able to:

• By the end of this session, at least 80% of participants will apply the session’s methodologies to:.
• Explain the global inequities in access to research education and identify the core competencies needed to address them.
• Describe how PAL, open-access resources, and open licensing collectively create a sustainable, equitable research education ecosystem.
• Understand IFMSA’s specific efforts to strengthen research capacity building, advocacy, and research exchanges through its open educational practices, the BRCF, organizational structures, and tools such as strategic plans and baseline assessments.
• Assess strategies for implementing open-access educational frameworks within their own contexts, such as reusing openly licensed training materials, establishing shared resource repositories, or developing peer-led training models.
• Design research training initiatives that integrate open practices, ensuring scalability, inclusivity, and sustainability.

This session will describe the development of an OER by collaborators in India and Canada. The original idea for this project arose out of a thought that, like common journalists, teachers and students are not capable of reporting, writing and analyzing the news information they want to share with the academic community.

The team engaged in a joint collaboration on an Open Education for a Better World (OE4BW) project in 2021-22. The OE4BW project involved the creation and delivery of a MOOC in Educational Journalism. This then led to a collaboration by the three participants in the development of an open resource through the Pressbooks platform.

One of the goals of the project was to create a more accessible and interactive resource for educationists/academicians in educational journalism.

An additional goal of this presentation is to describe the best practices for selection of cross-cultural teams, digital tools, interactive multimedia and strategies for maintaining openness.

Attendees of this session will be able to:

• Describe the challenges involved in cross-cultural open education collaborations.
• Identify strategies for addressing challenges to maintaining downstream openness.
• Explore processes for identifying appropriate digital tools for open content development.
• Identify the skills needed to pursue cross-cultural open content creation projects.
• Gain insights into how to create effective cross-cultural teams for open educational projects.

This session presents a scalable, classroom-based Wikipedia Editathon model implemented at JSS Medical College to advance open educational resources (OER), multilingual knowledge production, and digital equity. Students contributed to underrepresented topics in communication sciences and disorders by creating and translating content into regional languages (e.g., Kannada), aligning with principles of participatory knowledge and inclusive access. The session highlights instructional design, training workflows, and assessment strategies (pre–post–delayed measures) used to evaluate student learning, engagement, and sustainability. Attendees will gain practical guidance on integrating Wikipedia-based assignments into curricula to promote open pedagogy, culturally responsive teaching, and global knowledge sharing.

Attendees of this session will be able to:

• Design a classroom-based Wikipedia Editathon aligned with OER and open pedagogy principles.
• Implement multilingual content creation strategies to support knowledge equity.

Open education expands access, but access alone does not sustain learning. When learners or instructors feel uncertain, disconnected, or unsupported, expertise is not enough to keep them engaged. Drawing on research in volunteer retention and learner-centered pedagogy, this session explores how connection, belonging, and psychological safety shape participation in open learning environments. Using The Carpentries as a case study, we highlight how community-driven teaching practices shift the focus from performance to participation by normalizing mistakes, encouraging collaboration, and centering the learner experience. Participants will reflect on moments when connection influenced their own learning and identify practical strategies to foster belonging in their contexts. This session reframes open education as not just what we share, but how we support one another in the space between us.

Attendees of this session will be able to:

• Analyze a learning environment to identify where connection and belonging are lacking.
• Distinguish between teaching approaches that emphasize performance versus participation.
• Design a small, actionable intervention to improve learner engagement or instructor support.

For many in educational technology, blogging has been framed as open digital writing within networked systems. Yet it has become entangled with platform logics—metrics, visibility, and virality—that distance it from lived experience and local community. This session reframes blogging as an open, situated, place-based practice.

Drawing on bava.studio—a physical storefront in Trento, Italy—this talk explores what happens when a blog is grounded in a material location. Posts become installations, archives become objects, and digital reflections move into public space. The blog shifts from a content stream to a site of encounter, curiosity, and conversation.

Through this experiment, I ask: What might edtech look like if accountable to place? How might blogging, freed from platform imperatives, support local culture, reflection, and meaningful community connection?

Attendees of this session will be able to:

• What if blogging were understood not merely as an online publishing tool, but as a place on Earth?
• In educational technology, blogging is often framed as digital writing within networked systems. Yet it has become entangled with platform logics—metrics, visibility, and virality—that distance it from lived experience and local community. This session reframes blogging as a situated, embodied, place-based practice grounded in openness as an approach: participation, sharing, and permeability between people and environments.
• Drawing on bava.studio—a physical storefront in Trento, Italy—this talk explores what happens when a blog is grounded in a material location. Posts become installations, archives become objects, and the blog becomes a site of encounter rather than a stream of content.
• This provocation asks: What might edtech look like if accountable to place? How might open, place-based blogging foster meaningful connection, reflection, and community in the real world?

Part call to action, part practical guide, this session offers a new frame for considering open education work. Beginning with a brief overview of why values-based work matters, this session will aim to problematize some of the common working assumptions of open education and then argue for a new approach. It will highlight several key parallels between the stated goals of open education work and several of the core principles of mutual aid, including: solidarity, non-hierarchy, intersectionality, and collective action. Finally, it will invite the audience to imagine what other lessons can be gleaned from organizing and mutual aid practices that might better position open education work to continue its impact for the long haul.

Attendees of this session will be able to:

• Describe the importance of values-based work.
• Identify the ways in which open education work can prop up existing systems of exploitation and oppression.
• Recognize the overlap between the basic tenets of mutual aid and open education work.
• Devise strategies for integrating mutual aid principles and organizing tactics into open education work.

Through our Libraries services, we have supported faculty who are engaging in open pedagogy projects, specifically student-created podcasts. We identified a gap in resources for the use of student-created podcasts and imagined an opportunity to embody the open value of reciprocity. Faculty integrated podcasting into their instruction with similar aims of creating spaces in their classrooms to explore themes of justice, access, inclusion, and belonging. Enabled by a state-level grant, the instructional designers developed a unique opportunity for faculty to gather and meet multiple goals. In this session, we will share the process we created and facilitated with four faculty that resulted in an openly licensed teaching guide. The faculty will reflect on their experiences of co-creating an OER. We are defining this unique space between us as the intersection of professional development, publishing process, and pedagogical reflection, which is grounded in open values and practices.

Attendees of this session will be able to:

• Identify the key components of the process used to develop a co-created interdisciplinary OER grounded in the values of open.
• Experience examples of various pedagogical uses of student-created podcasts as open pedagogy projects.
• Consider how they might adapt and/or learn from our experiences and the OER as we all seek to create learning spaces that are more innovative and inclusive through our open work.

Students today engage with learning in spaces like short-form video, podcasts, interactive apps, and social media, yet many open educational resources still rely on traditional formats like textbooks and PDFs. This workshop challenges that assumption by exploring how OER can be reimagined in formats students already use and enjoy.

Participants will explore strategies for creating non-traditional OER, including social-media-style content, audio, interactive media, comics, and microlearning modules, while emphasizing practical ways to maintain openness, accessibility, and impact.

A hands-on activity invites participants to take a concept and reimagine it as a short video, microlearning chunk, podcast segment, or visual/comic resource, collaborate to share ideas, and reflect on engagement and accessibility. Designed for instructors, designers, librarians, and open education advocates, this session provides actionable ideas to create resources that truly meet learners where they are.

Attendees of this session will be able to:

• Identify non-traditional OER formats, such as social-media-style content, audio resources, interactive media, comics, and microlearning modules, and explain how these formats can increase learner engagement and accessibility.
• Take a concept or learning objective and reimagine it in a format that aligns with learners’ habits and preferred platforms.
• Evaluate how different formats support diverse learners, promote accessibility, and enhance meaningful engagement with content.
• Outline practical steps for adapting or creating OER in non-traditional formats, including starting small, layering formats, and co-creating with learners.