2026 Open Education Conference

Open education has grown through wider access, resource sharing, and collaboration, but the governance structures needed to sustain these practices remain insufficiently addressed. As a result, open values such as participation, equity, and reuse are not translated into organizational action.

The International Federation of Medical Students Associations (IFMSA) addresses this gap through a participatory policy process that moves from needs assessment and collaborative drafting in Small Working Groups to review, democratic adoption, implementation, and renewal. Through this process, policy documents become practical tools that guide student advocacy, learning, and action thus functioning as an open educational infrastructure.

In this session, attendees will explore how open policy making can be used to build sustainable educational and advocacy frameworks in their own contexts, helping them strengthen student organizing, guide initiatives, and support long term open education practices.

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:.
• Describe IFMSA’s open policy-making process and its key steps, from needs assessment ,collaborative drafting to adoption, implementation, and renewal.
• Understand the three dimensions of open policy-making and how, when used as a framework, they can transform policy documents into open educational resources.
• Analyze how policy documents can guide diverse forms of implementation across thematic areas, including workshops, conferences, campaigns, partnerships, webinars, small working groups, and educational resources.
• Adapt strategies of open policy-making approaches within their own organizations, institutions, or cities to strengthen advocacy, student organizing, sustainability, and open education.

Open education often advances through disconnected efforts in policy, coordination, and practice. This session explores how connecting those “open dots” can strengthen impact across Europe. Drawing on SPARC Europe’s work on Connecting the Opens, the feasibility report for a European Open Education Alliance, and the community-building work of the European Network of Open Education Librarians (ENOEL), the presentation examines how open education can be better linked with related open movements, supported through stronger coordination, and sustained through practitioner networks. Rather than treating these as separate strands, it presents them as complementary parts of a broader strategy to advance open education as a public good. Attendees will gain a European perspective on how policy alignment, alliance-building, and community practice can work together to create more coherent, connected, and sustainable open education ecosystems.

Attendees of this session will be able to:

• Describe how policy, alliance-building, and community practice interact in shaping open education ecosystems.
• Explain the value of connecting open education with adjacent open movements.
• Identify key opportunities and challenges in building more coordinated open education structures at a regional level.
• Analyse the contribution of practitioner networks such as ENOEL to sustaining the open in practice.
• Apply the idea of “connecting the open dots” to their own institutional, national, or regional context.

Many authors spend months or years laboring over their open textbooks and find themselves faced with a similar challenge: how to get their book in front of the audience it was written for.

In this session, we’ll help first-time and experienced authors and publishers understand simple but effective things that they can do to ensure their publications find the audiences they were designed for. We'll cover how to add and improve your book's metadata, and how to add publications to institutional repositories, search engines, indexes, and popular open directories. We’ll discuss how to generate metadata exports that can be ingested in library catalogues and other discovery platforms. Finally, we'll share practical advice about promoting your published books, including tips for reaching a wider audience through email, online communities, social media and more. No matter what publishing platform you use, you'll leave with actionable next steps for increasing your books' visibility and impact.

Attendees of this session will be able to:

• (1) evaluate and improve the quality of their book's metadata to improve its discoverability.
• (2) identify key indexes and directories for OER submission.
• (3) apply a practical promotion strategy to help their publications reach wider audiences and more potential adopters.

This short presentation examines the instructional decisions involved in the creation of an OER for Spanish for Business Professionals at the University of Kentucky. Authenticity serves as a core principle in these decisions, as it lies at the intersection of OER practice, instructional design, and second language acquisition. Using this Business Spanish resource as a case study, the presentation will discuss its planning, development, and classroom implementation, showing how these choices are informed by instructional design and learning theories. It will also explore how authentic materials, meaningful tasks, and real-world professional contexts are integrated into the resource to support relevant and transferable learning, and it will reflect on possible next steps for further improvement.

Attendees of this session will be able to:

• Explain how OER, instructional design, and second language acquisition inform one another.
• Evaluate the role of authenticity in the design of second language learning materials.
• Analyze how learner needs and instructional context influence OER development.
• Apply practical principles for planning and developing OER in higher education.
• Identify transferable strategies for revising and improving openly licensed teaching materials.

This lightening talk examines key competences required for creating Open Educational Resources (OERs). For this, it presents the modular OER training programme at the University of Graz (Austria) and explains how this programme is embedded into the university’s OER strategy.

The OER training programme consists of three components: a self-study course on Moodle, a base module with four webinars, and a qualification module in which participants create and publish three new OERs. Successful completion leads to the certificate “OER Practitioner”, awarded by the Austrian association “Forum for New Media in Teaching Austria”. The accredited pedagogical concept is openly accessible on the University of Graz OER repository.

The talk argues that such structured professional development programmes are crucial for enabling teachers to implement Open Education sustainably in their teaching and it seeks to inspire participants to reflect on and further develop their own OER skills.

Attendees of this session will be able to:

• … explain the value of OER competences (such as copyright expertise, quality assurance, pedagogical design) for higher education institutions and their teachers.
• … understand the structure and components of the modular OER training programme and consider how it could be adapted or transferred into their own institutional contexts.
• … reflect on their own OER competences and the relevance for their teaching.

At HAN University of Applied Sciences, we are building an ecosystem that gives students and educators easy access to high‑quality learning resources, open, semi‑open, and commercial, to create an optimal mix for teaching and learning. We believe education should be accessible, reliable, and inclusive, and that public resources should be used wisely through sharing and reuse.

Rather than treating openness as a separate goal, HAN embeds Open Educational Resources (OER) into everyday practice through an institution‑wide strategy. This approach is built on five pillars: hands‑on support through a Content Support Team; professional development to strengthen OER competencies; recognition and rewards for open educational practices; structured change management at faculty level; and a robust technical infrastructure centered on a single institutional repository. Together, these pillars enable sustainable adoption of openness at scale.

Attendees of this session will be able to:

• Explain HANs five-pillar institutional approach and how these pillars collectively enable sustainable OER adoption.
• Identify practical strategies for supporting educators in combining open, semi-open, and licensed resources into coherent, high-quality learning materials.
• Evaluate the role of recognition and rewards in increasing faculty engagement with OER and understand how to implement similar incentives in their organizations.
• Adapt governance and change-management practices that support cultural and structural shifts toward open and blended resource use.

Open Educational Resources (OER) are promoted in different ways around the world. In the US, this work is often called “OER advocacy,” while in South Africa the Open Education Influencers MOOC (https://oe4bw.org/project/open-education-influencer/) is a notable example.

This lightning talk shares how the University of Innsbruck is reaching a wider audience:

* OER practitioners talked about the creation and the publication of their projects in The JOERney@UIBK: Experience Talks (https://oerworldmap.org/resource/urn:uuid:75e1c2a7-8540-4ff2-b2c6-04b2f23b3cda?language=en).

* The Aqua MOOC, a 2021 citizen science MOOC on water communities, was presented at a local district club. Volunteers from Computerias and libraries were invited.

The findings from this talk may inspire attendees of the lightning talk to leverage local venues, themselves; using a single, high-interest MOOC or resource, other OER and the OER repositories can be cross-promoted to potential re-users and interested people.

Attendees of this session will be able to:

• …find connections between marketing OER at their institutions and involving local volunteers in the dissemination of information about OER.
• …think outside "the box", aka their institutional limits, and reach for a wider audience.
• …generate new leads for their OER practitioners to create OER for and broadening their understanding or who their ideal audience might include.
• …gain an understanding for the value of “old” OER and the sustainability efforts included in the production and the active advertising of a MOOC with so-called "ever-green contents" that is intended for a "long run".

In this presentation, Robin DeRosa, Executive Director of the Open Education Network, will explore the theory of change that undergirds the OEN. In a community that focuses its activities on the grassroots work of educators (including faculty, librarians, instructional designers, technologists, and other support staff), the OEN’s membership structure centers around institutions and consortia. What is the relationship between individuals who engage with open practices and the systems that contain, support, and sometimes thwart them? How can organizations that leverage open education to make change respond to the needs of learners and teachers while building support from the surrounding educational systems that don’t always center those needs? Hear about the rationales, hopes, and tensions that animate the OEN’s model, and the current ways we are envisioning our role in advancing open education and building a more equitable future for higher education.

Attendees of this session will be able to:

• Reflect on the tensions and synergies between individual practice and systemic support in the open education movement.
• Articulate reasons why both grassroots practice and institutional commitment are key sustainable and impactful open education progress.
• Understand the approach of the Open Education Network, and how it leverages institutional commitment to make structural change in higher education.

What if the most productive learning spaces are the ones we don’t fully control? OERcamp operates between structure and emergence—combining planned formats with self-organised collaboration. As a BarCamp-based modal, an open, participant-driven unconference format, it has no fixed programme, instead attendees collaboratively shape the agenda and sessions through peer-to-peer learning.

Drawing on 14 years of experience, this presentation shows how fluid roles foster engagement and sustainable community building. It reflects on how participatory formats can surface challenges in open education and how communities respond collectively.

Transfer: Participants gain practical insights into designing participatory formats and cultivating communities that support open education over time. This proposal contributes to “Beyond Borders” by sharing perspectives from the German open education community.

Attendees of this session will be able to:

• Recognize the value of “in-between” spaces for participation and knowledge creation in open education.
• Learn how to design participatory formats that enable engagement without relying on full control or predefined roles.
• Develop practical approaches to building and sustaining community-driven open education communities.

This session will provide an overview of how and why TUS Open Press has published a collection of inclusive teaching and learning OER. This collection includes TUS Sensory Awareness Guide, Your Essay Builder: Clear Steps to Plan and Structure Your Essay and forthcoming publications including Starting University Guide for Students with Disabilities and a Case Study of how Mind Mapping Software was successfully used in our institution. We will share the perspectives of the authors and how they have embraced Open Licensing. Our authors have created their works using Universal Design for Learning (UDL) principles and have very generously shared their considerable expertise with our TUS Open Press Community of Practice members which has been hugely beneficial. We are excited to continue supporting our Student Support Services colleagues to publish Pressbooks which embody inclusive teaching practices for the benefit of our TUS university community, and the OER community more broadly.

Attendees of this session will be able to:

• Understand the origins of, and ethos behind, this inclusive teaching and learning OER collection.
• Engage with the OER collection.
• Reflect on the experiences of these OER creators.