2026 Open Education Conference

Global contexts often present a rigid gap between the right to education and restrictive enrollment regulations. Drawing on two decades of higher education administration expertise, this session explores how systemic quotas stifle learning, offering a global perspective on a shared institutional challenge.

Designed for higher education administrators, policy developers, and open education coordinators, this session proposes a transferable 4-stage roadmap. We examine scalable solutions, including community-based learning for capacity constraints, reimagining secondary benchmarks, and institutional qualifying tracks. Attendees will gain systemic insights into shifting from capacity-based admission to an open, digital-first ecosystem. We conclude with lessons on how professional licensing maintains quality while enabling radical accessibility, helping participants navigate structural bottlenecks within their own institutions.

Attendees of this session will be able to:

• Identify the legislative and administrative bottlenecks that hinder educational equity and enrollment in traditional systems.
• Explain how "Community Schools" and decentralized models can effectively address resource scarcity and school overcrowding.
• Analyze a multi-stage roadmap for transitioning from "capacity-based" admission to a "competency-based" educational ecosystem.
• Evaluate the role of Open Education and digital production in bypassing physical infrastructure constraints for higher education.
• Propose a framework for decoupling academic degrees from professional licensing to ensure both quality and radical inclusivity.

Since 2013, the Global Open Graduate Network (GO-GN) has supported doctoral and postdoctoral research in open education and practices worldwide. In 2023, we conducted a 10 year anniversary strategic review (Farrow et al., 2024) with our membership and the wider GO-GN and open education communities. This review captured the network’s achievements to date and future aspirations, including exploration of a more federated approach for the network.

This presentation reports on the outcome of this work, which focused on a pilot programme to establish and evaluate four regional hubs (Asia-Pacific, Canada, Ibero-America and Kenya). We will report on the development of these regional hubs across six continents, relating insights from the evaluation and reflecting on how other open education networks might approach questions of scale, diversity and sustainability.

Attendees of this session will be able to:

• Critically evaluate the design and implementation of a federated network model (as exemplified by GO-GN pilot regional hubs) in relation to challenges of scale, diversity, and sustainability in open education.
• Analyse the role of regionalisation and distributed leadership in building research capacity, particularly in relation to equity, autonomy, and responsiveness to Global South contexts.
• Apply insights from the GO-GN hub pilots and evaluation to inform the development or adaptation of networked initiatives in open education or related fields.