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.

Across disciplines and institutions, instructors face growing challenges regarding student engagement and academic integrity. These challenges are compounded by the emergence of AI and shifting workforce needs. Our workforce requires students to develop an ever-increasing set of skills to obtain entry-level jobs. Traditional print textbooks can't keep pace with these shifts, but OER can!

Drawing on data from the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025, this session highlights the skills and competencies increasingly valued by employers worldwide. We’ll share practical strategies for customizing OER to support skill development, respond to emerging technologies, and meet local and industry-specific needs, all while maintaining academic rigor and relevance. Participants will leave with an AI prompt template to create five ready-to-implement, skills-based assignments that align with emerging workforce needs, meet course objectives, and incorporate OER content.

Attendees of this session will be able to:

• Identify key challenges facing college educators, including maintaining student engagement, managing the impact of AI, and equipping students with ever-changing, in-demand career skills.
• Analyze emerging workforce skills from the World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs Report 2025 and their relevance in specific academic disciplines.
• Explain how OER can be customized to support skill development while maintaining academic rigor.
• Apply a structured AI prompt template to generate 1) skills-based learning activities aligned with course objectives, open content, and industry needs, and 2) aligned instructional support materials (e.g., grading rubrics, scaffolding for struggling students).
• Refine AI-generated activities to ensure they support individual course contexts, follow accessibility best practices, and meet activity design preferences.

Public debate continues to rage over AI policy - the economic, technical, and legal regulation of AI tool creation and use. These debates, however, reduce the interests down to a balancing of the interest and demands of the content industry with the interests and demands of the technology industry. Neither of those interests align particularly closely with the interests of users, and of public interest institutions including libraries, educational institutions, and the populations they serve.

The members of the panel will discuss what issues define the public interest as distinct from both of these corporate interests - working from the experience of the open education community as both committed to the public interest and engaged with new technologies. We will cover interests including accessibility, transparency, due process, interoperability, and surveillance - focusing on implementation choices made by institutions and educators with an open pedagogy framework.

Attendees of this session will be able to:

• Better understand the way specific choices in AI implementation will affect open pedagogy goals, including student centeredness and student agency.
• Advocate for the interests of public institutions in the AI policy debate.
• Contribute to the exploration of emerging interests as AI policy is made at institutional and legal levels.

This session shares a grassroots initiative in Indonesia that empowers women to move from learning to contributing in open knowledge platforms. Through the SheSaid 2025 campaign, participants were introduced to Wikimedia projects such as Wikiquote and Wikimedia Commons, as well as basic Creative Commons licensing. Through hands-on activities, they created quote posters using openly licensed images and learned to share knowledge responsibly. This session highlights the “space between” learning and active contribution, demonstrating how open education can bridge gaps in participation and representation, particularly for women in digital knowledge spaces. The strategies used in this initiative—combining training, mentorship, and hands-on contribution opportunities—can also be adapted to other open education and community-based learning contexts beyond Wikimedia.

Attendees of this session will be able to:

• Understand how open education initiatives can empower women in underrepresented communities.
• Identify strategies to bridge the gap between learning and active contribution in Wikimedia projects.
• Apply basic Creative Commons licensing in creating and sharing open content.
• Recognize the impact of community-based programs such as SheSaid in increasing women’s participation in open knowledge.

Open Education programming often favors the familiar, but curiosity and connection can take us somewhere meaningful and new.

This talk explores what happens when we treat programming not as event planning, but as relationship-building. It highlights how curiosity, informal conversations, and community feedback can lead to more inclusive and responsive programming. I’ll share two experimental formats shaped by this philosophy: 1) From the Field, and 2) Open Exchange – both designed to create space for dialogue, not just delivery.

Working in “the space between” means making room for new perspectives, unexpected connections, and the kind of conversations that don’t always fit neatly into a traditional webinar format, but matter just the same. This is an invitation to consider not just what we share, but who we make space for, how we design it, and who we might become as a result.

Attendees of this session will be able to:

• Reframe programming as relationship-building, understanding how curiosity, informal conversations, and community feedback can guide more responsive and inclusive programming.
• Apply design strategies for dialogue, recognizing how experimental formats, like unrecorded peer discussions, can create safe spaces for candid conversations and richer engagement.
• Explore how intentionally designing for connection and new perspectives can enhance the impact of Open Education efforts.

This session is about analyzing how open education can help connect what medical students learn about health in their medical school to what actually happens in real communities by highlighting how open-access resources, peer learning, and digital platforms can enhance public health training and empower students to apply their knowledge beyond the classroom.

The presentation will discuss practical strategies for integrating open educational practices into public health education, including student-led community awareness initiatives, and how to use freely available learning materials. However, it will also address challenges such as limited access to structured resources, variability in community engagement, and the need for culturally appropriate content.

People who attend this session will learn how open education can make public health training practical, accessible, and focused on the community especially in places where resources are limited.

Attendees of this session will be able to:

• 1- Explain how open education will be able to facilitate the transfer of health knowledge from academic education to community-based public health programs.
• 2- List some open education materials and technologies being used in the field of public health that may serve them well.
• 3- Inform them about the responsibility of students in facilitating community-based health educational programs.
• 4- Identify obstacles that may hinder them while implementing open education in the field of public health.
• 5- Utilize methods by which they can incorporate open education in their public health education and practice.

Many communities in low resource areas could benefit from access to the content available in OER materials if only they were able to access them. While this content is technically free the act of connecting to the internet and downloading it still presents a barrier in terms of economics and infrastructure in many parts of the world. Offline servers filled with OER are part of the solution to fill that gap. A large variety of groups work to collate materials and create servers with localized wi-fi networks that will work in low resource environments.

This talk focuses on a new partnership between the distributors of one offline server and the government of a low-income country. Following their progress to design a localized build that encompasses the required curriculum and local language needs as well as distribute their devices in one of the most geographically challenging environments in the world.

Attendees of this session will be able to:

• Greater understanding of partnerships between volunteers, NGO’s and Government bodies.
• Describe and reproduce the steps for localization of OER content.
• Describe and reproduce the steps for distributing OER servers.

Western scientists recently “discovered” a new organ in our bodies: the Interstitium. This collagen scaffolding had long been discarded by conventional medicine and belief systems as static and generally in the way. However, a fresh look with modern tools at LIVING tissue (!) revealed that the Interstitium has myriad life-sustaining functions, previously unrecognized or underappreciated. It activates the Spaces Between within our bodies.

The Interstitium is also a powerful metaphor and a generative frame of reference for situations where reciprocal flows of knowledge, creativity, and care are vital yet unnoticed. This metaphor, brought to light in a 2023 Radiolab podcast, has spurred a growing community of practice for “Interstitionaries” who do this essential but often unsung bridging work. In this talk, I’ll introduce the Interstium as metaphor and methods, and highlight how its methods (including a self-assessment and discussion prompts) might serve the open education community.

Attendees of this session will be able to:

• Understand the Interstitium as an inspiring and useful metaphor for any socially-connected work.
• Use the Interstitium model and its practices to help unlock new approaches for relational and recognition challenges and opportunities in open education work.