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.

Open education often lives in the “space between”—but one of the least examined divides is between K–12 and higher education. Why have these OER ecosystems largely developed in parallel, and what would it take to align them toward a shared national agenda?

This interactive panel brings state leaders into conversation across sectors to surface the tensions and opportunities at that boundary. K–12 OER is shaped by standards alignment, district adoption, and system-level funding, while higher ed centers faculty autonomy and affordability. Where do these models clash—and where might they connect?

Panelists will engage the audience in tackling shared challenges—accessibility, sustainability, awareness, and responsible AI use—while exploring practical points of alignment, from pre-service teacher preparation to dual enrollment course design. The goal: move beyond comparison to identify where collaboration is necessary, and possible.

Attendees of this session will be able to:

• Identify key policy and practice differences shaping OER in K–12 and higher education.
• Examine why these systems have evolved in parallel—and where alignment is emerging or possible.
• Compare state and organizational strategies for sustaining OER across distinct governance and funding models.
• Explore shared challenges across sectors.
• Apply cross-sector insights to opportunities such as pre-service teacher preparation and dual enrollment.
• Engage in dialogue to identify practical strategies for building a more connected, national OER agenda.

As AI tools become increasingly common in OER creation, the question is no longer whether authors use them — it's how to disclose that use honestly and transparently.

The KPU AI Declaration Framework for OER Creation takes a human-centred approach, asking not "what did AI do?" but "what was the relationship between the author and AI?" The framework adapts Kari D. Weaver's AID Framework for OER contexts, identifying ten categories of activity relevant to publishing projects. It incorporates the Me & My Machine labels — adapted for a North American context — to capture the spectrum from fully independent human creation to AI-generated content, making human effort and creative direction visible even where AI plays a significant role.

A self-assessment rubric, interactive rubric tool, and Pressbooks front matter template support authors in building their own declaration statement. While developed for OER, the framework applies to any resource creation project.

Attendees of this session will be able to:

• Describe the KPU AI Declaration Framework for OER Creation — including its categories, label system, and self-assessment rubric —and identify how it differs from existing approaches to AI disclosure.
• Determine whether and how a human-centred approach to AI disclosure might be implemented in their own institutional or publishing context.