2026 Open Education Conference

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.

We argue that AI hasn’t made OER obsolete, but instead makes them more urgent. To respond to the challenges created by AI, we present a framework and toolkit for intentional human-centred OER design. In a world of abundant information and instant AI-generated answers, the key challenge for learning is no longer open access alone, but trust, context, critical thinking, and meaning.

Our session challenges dominant AI‑and‑OER narratives by suggesting that the future is less about AI‑assisted OER content creation and more about trusted, human-centred OERs that humanise the training data from which AI learns.

Our toolkit provides practical ways to embed authentic educator presence, transparent standpoint, intentional learning design, and community accountability into OER - qualities AI struggles to offer. This approach addresses the paradox of AI efficiency - where instant answers erode critical thinking and “desirable difficulty” - and shows how open pedagogies can restore these qualities.

Attendees of this session will be able to:

• Critique the pedagogical challenges created by AI, particularly the tension between instant information access and the erosion of critical thinking and desirable difficulty.
• Reframe the value proposition of OERs from access alone towards a human-centred approach grounded in deliberate learning design, verifiable provenance, and transparent standpoint.
• Apply an OER ideation framework to design learning experiences that prioritise intentional human-centred design, educator presence, and rich context to complement AI-mediated learning.
• Recognise the critical role of trusted, human-curated OERs in sustaining the integrity and educational value of future generative AI learning ecosystems.
• Use the framework and toolkit to articulate and advocate for the value of human-curated OERs to colleagues, leaders, and institutional stakeholders in an AI-mediated learning environment.