2026 Open Education Conference

By 2030, Deakin Library aspires for all students to have barrier-free access to essential curriculum resources. But our institutional systems, policies and practices weren’t designed with that goal in mind.

Historically, curriculum resource provision has been shaped without sufficient consideration of affordability and access. Cost, licensing, rights management, and the opportunities open resources afford student-centred learning are not consistently factored into resource choice. Open Education is identified in institutional strategy, yet efforts remain fragmented and not fully integrated into curriculum governance.

Policy change in 2025 prioritised barrier-free curriculum resources in curriculum design and delivery, marking a significant shift for the organisation. This prompted Deakin Library to assess current barriers and deliver a multi-year institutional roadmap for implementation to achieve our ‘barrier-free’ vision.

This lightning talk outlines our approach and key findings.

Attendees of this session will be able to:

• Identify how libraries can effectively frame current state challenges in ways their institutions can understand and engage with.
• Apply road-mapping as a strategic tool to translate ambitious access and affordability goals into achievable institutional actions.
• Articulate the strategic value of OER as a sustainable, institution wide investment rather than a siloed initiative.

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.

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.