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.

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?

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.

Our presentation highlights how internationally collaborative authorship advances open education, using Confident Supervisors Vol2 as a case study.

Published by QUT with support from JCU, this open education resource (OER) connected contributors from Australia, Aotearoa New Zealand, Indonesia, Singapore, South Africa and the UK, to create a professional development resource to support research supervisors and developers. It showcases the diversity of learnings that develop when authors collaborate across borders.

We position open publishers as enablers of knowledge production and a mechanism for bridging the gap between the global North and South. We will share the framework behind the publication, including approaches to authorship agreements, accessibility, copyright, and licensing.

The Space Between explored is how collaborative OER projects leverage the spaces between traditional scholarly communication models to create more inclusive and globally relevant educational resources.

Attendees of this session will be able to:

• Explain the short- and long-term roles of the publisher, editor and author in the implementation of an OER project.
• Discuss approaches to navigating staffing and infrastructure limitations to develop and deliver a sustainable OER project.
• Explore the opportunities and challenges of working across disciplines, countries, national borders and institutional frameworks to realise an OER project within a limited timeframe.
• Demonstrate the role open publishing and publishers play in diversifying the scholarly publishing landscape.
• Reveal the ongoing impact of OER outcomes for key stakeholders, including creators and users, locally and globally. Creators achieve enhanced skills and profiling, and users have access to additional resources for their personal use or application within their institution.