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.

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?

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.

This session explores student–staff partnership in co-creating interactive Open Educational Resources (OER) in medical education.

Using the OpenStax Microbiology Ancillaries (OSMA) project and a current collaboration with a medical student developing immunology resources for a Foundations of Allergic Diseases (FAD) module, we demonstrate how students and educators can co-create inclusive, scalable learning materials using H5P, generative AI, case-based learning, and the IDEA framework.

We reflect on how AI can accelerate resource creation while still requiring human pedagogical oversight, critical review, and inclusive design. Through comparison of modular LMS-embedded activities and textbook-style interactive resources, we explore tensions around usability, scalability, openness, and quality.

Co-presented by an educator and student partner, this session offers dual perspectives and practical strategies for engaging students as partners in AI-enhanced OER development.

Attendees of this session will be able to:

• By the end of this session, participants will be able to:.
• Evaluate different approaches for developing and delivering interactive OER (modular LMS-based vs textbook-style).
• Identify strategies for engaging students as partners in AI-enhanced OER co-creation.
• Apply inclusive and pedagogically informed design principles (e.g., UDL) when using AI to develop educational resources.
• Consider trade-offs between scalability, openness, quality assurance, and human oversight in digital resource development.