2026 Open Education Conference

This session will describe the development of an OER by collaborators in India and Canada. The original idea for this project arose out of a thought that, like common journalists, teachers and students are not capable of reporting, writing and analyzing the news information they want to share with the academic community.

The team engaged in a joint collaboration on an Open Education for a Better World (OE4BW) project in 2021-22. The OE4BW project involved the creation and delivery of a MOOC in Educational Journalism. This then led to a collaboration by the three participants in the development of an open resource through the Pressbooks platform.

One of the goals of the project was to create a more accessible and interactive resource for educationists/academicians in educational journalism.

An additional goal of this presentation is to describe the best practices for selection of cross-cultural teams, digital tools, interactive multimedia and strategies for maintaining openness.

Attendees of this session will be able to:

• Describe the challenges involved in cross-cultural open education collaborations.
• Identify strategies for addressing challenges to maintaining downstream openness.
• Explore processes for identifying appropriate digital tools for open content development.
• Identify the skills needed to pursue cross-cultural open content creation projects.
• Gain insights into how to create effective cross-cultural teams for open educational projects.

Pakistan’s state-mandated curricula often create “us/them” narratives that hinder intercultural understanding, moral development, and inclusive national identity. Openness is fundamentally relational – these gaps can be bridged when knowledge flows freely across borders. At Forman Christian College (Pakistan), I designed and co-taught open-collaborative courses with faculty at International Christian University, Tokyo, through the Global Liberal Arts Alliance’s Global Course Connection programme. My 2025 research on “Small shifts, big impacts: Cultivating intercultural skills through online global classrooms” shows how virtual exchanges and open pedagogy deliver measurable gains in global citizenship. This session also draws on forthcoming work on minority (Christian) teachers’ lived experiences and education’s role in shaping Pakistan’s inclusive identity. Attendees will leave with adaptable tools to close policy-practice gaps and advance relational openness worldwide.

Attendees of this session will be able to:

• Identify “spaces between” closed national curricula and open education possibilities in diverse contexts.
• Apply Global South examples of virtual global classrooms and open pedagogy to design inclusive, cross-border learning experiences.
• Evaluate OER strategies that support intercultural competence, peace education, and minority voices in resource-constrained settings.

This session presents a scalable, classroom-based Wikipedia Editathon model implemented at JSS Medical College to advance open educational resources (OER), multilingual knowledge production, and digital equity. Students contributed to underrepresented topics in communication sciences and disorders by creating and translating content into regional languages (e.g., Kannada), aligning with principles of participatory knowledge and inclusive access. The session highlights instructional design, training workflows, and assessment strategies (pre–post–delayed measures) used to evaluate student learning, engagement, and sustainability. Attendees will gain practical guidance on integrating Wikipedia-based assignments into curricula to promote open pedagogy, culturally responsive teaching, and global knowledge sharing.

Attendees of this session will be able to:

• Design a classroom-based Wikipedia Editathon aligned with OER and open pedagogy principles.
• Implement multilingual content creation strategies to support knowledge equity.

Since 2013, the Global Open Graduate Network (GO-GN) has supported doctoral and postdoctoral research in open education and practices worldwide. In 2023, we conducted a 10 year anniversary strategic review (Farrow et al., 2024) with our membership and the wider GO-GN and open education communities. This review captured the network’s achievements to date and future aspirations, including exploration of a more federated approach for the network.

This presentation reports on the outcome of this work, which focused on a pilot programme to establish and evaluate four regional hubs (Asia-Pacific, Canada, Ibero-America and Kenya). We will report on the development of these regional hubs across six continents, relating insights from the evaluation and reflecting on how other open education networks might approach questions of scale, diversity and sustainability.

Attendees of this session will be able to:

• Critically evaluate the design and implementation of a federated network model (as exemplified by GO-GN pilot regional hubs) in relation to challenges of scale, diversity, and sustainability in open education.
• Analyse the role of regionalisation and distributed leadership in building research capacity, particularly in relation to equity, autonomy, and responsiveness to Global South contexts.
• Apply insights from the GO-GN hub pilots and evaluation to inform the development or adaptation of networked initiatives in open education or related fields.

After participating in this session, learners will be able to explain how digital transformation can be understood as a pathway for expanding open education in Chinese universities.

After participating in this session, learners will be able to identify how MOOCs, online open courses, shared platforms, and AI-supported tools widen access, flexibility, and resource sharing.

After participating in this session, learners will be able to assess the main constraints on digitally mediated openness, including inequality, governance, recognition, and platform dependence.

After participating in this session, learners will be able to apply insights from the Chinese case to wider discussions of emerging technologies and open education.

Attendees of this session will be able to:

• Understand how digital transformation is reshaping open education in Chinese universities.
• Recognize how MOOCs, online open courses, shared platforms, and AI-supported tools expand access, flexibility, and resource sharing.
• Identify the main opportunities and challenges that emerging technologies bring to open education in the Chinese higher education context.
• Reflect on how the Chinese case can inform broader discussions about inclusive and sustainable open education.

While Open Education (OE) focuses on digital access, it often ignores the physical and cognitive realities of learners in the Global South. This session presents a case study from the PragatiSankalp India Foundation in Nashik, Maharashtra, addressing two barriers: "Spatial Scarcity" and "Algorithmic Sycophancy."

Grounded in Ambedkarite philosophy, we share findings from socio-economic surveys of 600+ residents in Bhim Nagar. We identify how high-density housing creates a physical barrier to learning, solved by our "Bodh Saksham Study Hall"—a physical open-infrastructure hub.

We also tackle the cognitive risk of AI in OE. We demonstrate how AI "sycophancy", the tendency for models to prioritize agreement over truth, harms first-generation learners. We propose "Intentional Role Prompting" as a pedagogical tool to turn AI from a "yes-man" into a constructive mentor. Attendees will learn a scalable model for bridging the gap between digital openness and physical/ethical access.

Attendees of this session will be able to:

• Define "Spatial Scarcity" and identify it as a critical barrier to the use of Open Educational Resources in high-density urban environments.
• Apply "Intentional Role Prompting" techniques to mitigate AI sycophancy and encourage critical thinking in student-AI interactions.
• Describe the "Open Infrastructure" model for community learning centers that combine physical safety with ethical digital guardrails.
• Utilize localized socio-economic data to advocate for interdisciplinary safety standards in open education.

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.

Openness and flexibility remain insufficiently integrated in mainstream K–12 education, even though several of their elements are already visible in fragmented forms. This session examines how principles and practices of open education may be meaningfully integrated into school education, while also recognizing the pedagogical, structural, and administrative constraints that shape such possibilities. Situated in the Indian context, the session draws on a systematic literature review and findings from a learner perception survey to explore how openness and flexibility may support more inclusive, adaptive, and continuity-oriented schooling. It further considers which dimensions of openness are already present in school education, which may be meaningfully integrated, and which continue to remain constrained within existing systems. In doing so, the session moves beyond advocacy for flexibility to examine its practical usefulness, perceived value, and systemic limits in school education.

Attendees of this session will be able to:

• Participants will develop a clearer understanding of openness and flexibility in K–12 education and how these relate to open schooling, conventional schooling, and other educational modalities.
• Participants will identify existing school practices and structures that reflect elements of openness in partial or fragmented forms, such as flexible pathways, inclusive design, and learner-centred approaches.
• Participants will gain insight into how findings from the systematic literature review and learner perception survey inform the possibilities of greater openness and flexibility in K–12 schooling.
• Participants will critically reflect on the pedagogical, structural, administrative, and policy-related challenges involved in integrating openness and flexibility into mainstream school education.
• Participants will identify possible pathways through which openness, flexibility, and technology-enabled practices may support more adaptive and continuity-oriented K–12 education.

Imagine a world where you grow up never having enough to read. This is the reality for many children who speak minority or indigenous languages (hereafter “underserved languages”). The scarcity of juvenile titles (fiction, non-fiction, videos, games, audio books, etc.) in their own languages is a persistent barrier to learning. We invite collaborators to a research group with the goal of building and expanding processes for creators—writers, editors, illustrators, and translators—who can benefit from networking and professional development and learning to use Creative Commons licensing and other OA policies and practices. We wish to amplify collaborative efforts by creators to increase available titles in underserved languages. Our central goals are to establish a design for a replicable, democratic, and participatory multilingual collaborative and to analyze the design process. We will share a pilot that we have conducted in 2026 with speakers of Yoruba and Burmese in Indiana, USA.

Attendees of this session will be able to:

• Participants will gain specific knowledge about the gaps in access to literacy and learning materials for learners who speak underserved languages around the world.
• Participants will learn about storytelling and story creation efforts in Indiana that we have begun with Yoruba and Burmese speakers.
• Participants will be invited to join scholarly and practical efforts to share practices and ideas for developing and providing juvenile titles in underserved languages in areas that are of concern to them.