2026 Open Education Conference

Open educational resources (OERs) are frequently promoted as mechanisms for improving access and equity in higher education, yet comparatively less attention has been paid to how students perceive and engage with OERs when adopted in place of commercial textbooks. This session presents a student‑led research study investigating student perceptions of textbooks and OERs within a large, multi‑degree science unit.

Situated in the space between research and curriculum practice, the study adopts a staged approach to OER adoption in which selected unit themes integrate curated OERs while others retain a traditional prescribed textbook, enabling investigation into student perceptions across different resource contexts.

The session will report findings from survey data and student focus groups, demonstrating how student perceptions of access, engagement, and resource preference can meaningfully inform evidence‑informed OER adoption strategies across disciplines.

Attendees of this session will be able to:

• Describe how student-led research can meaningfully inform decisions about OER adoption in undergraduate courses.
• Identify key factors shaping student perceptions of textbooks and OERs, including access, engagement, and resource preferences.
• Explain the value of a staged approach to OER adoption for gathering evidence while maintaining curriculum continuity.
• Apply insights from this research design to centre student voice in evidence-informed OER initiatives across disciplines.

Most research into the impact of Open Educational Resources (OER) comes from quantitative studies conducted in North America, leaving stories of OER impact from other geographic contexts underexplored. This session contributes to the Beyond Borders conversation by sharing research from Deakin University in Melbourne, Australia. The study responds to calls for Australian OER research to contribute to the open movement in new and innovative ways. The project investigates OER impact in the Australian higher education context using podcasting as a qualitative research methodology. Podcasting is an emerging approach to qualitative research that can complement the quantitative evidence base by generating rich narrative data that amplifies participants' own stories. Preliminary findings and emerging themes from fieldwork with Deakin OER authors will be shared, alongside reflection on what this research contributes to the global conversation about OER impact.

Attendees of this session will be able to:

• Identify gaps in the geographic and methodological scope of OER impact research.
• Recognise the rationale for using podcasting as a qualitative research methodology.
• Recall preliminary findings from an Australian study into OER impact.
• Reflect on the contribution of Australian OER research to the global conversation about OER impact.

Our presentation highlights how internationally collaborative authorship advances open education, using Confident Supervisors Vol2 as a case study.

Published by QUT with support from JCU, this open education resource (OER) connected contributors from Australia, Aotearoa New Zealand, Indonesia, Singapore, South Africa and the UK, to create a professional development resource to support research supervisors and developers. It showcases the diversity of learnings that develop when authors collaborate across borders.

We position open publishers as enablers of knowledge production and a mechanism for bridging the gap between the global North and South. We will share the framework behind the publication, including approaches to authorship agreements, accessibility, copyright, and licensing.

The Space Between explored is how collaborative OER projects leverage the spaces between traditional scholarly communication models to create more inclusive and globally relevant educational resources.

Attendees of this session will be able to:

• Explain the short- and long-term roles of the publisher, editor and author in the implementation of an OER project.
• Discuss approaches to navigating staffing and infrastructure limitations to develop and deliver a sustainable OER project.
• Explore the opportunities and challenges of working across disciplines, countries, national borders and institutional frameworks to realise an OER project within a limited timeframe.
• Demonstrate the role open publishing and publishers play in diversifying the scholarly publishing landscape.
• Reveal the ongoing impact of OER outcomes for key stakeholders, including creators and users, locally and globally. Creators achieve enhanced skills and profiling, and users have access to additional resources for their personal use or application within their institution.

We argue that AI hasn’t made OER obsolete, but instead makes them more urgent. To respond to the challenges created by AI, we present a framework and toolkit for intentional human-centred OER design. In a world of abundant information and instant AI-generated answers, the key challenge for learning is no longer open access alone, but trust, context, critical thinking, and meaning.

Our session challenges dominant AI‑and‑OER narratives by suggesting that the future is less about AI‑assisted OER content creation and more about trusted, human-centred OERs that humanise the training data from which AI learns.

Our toolkit provides practical ways to embed authentic educator presence, transparent standpoint, intentional learning design, and community accountability into OER - qualities AI struggles to offer. This approach addresses the paradox of AI efficiency - where instant answers erode critical thinking and “desirable difficulty” - and shows how open pedagogies can restore these qualities.

Attendees of this session will be able to:

• Critique the pedagogical challenges created by AI, particularly the tension between instant information access and the erosion of critical thinking and desirable difficulty.
• Reframe the value proposition of OERs from access alone towards a human-centred approach grounded in deliberate learning design, verifiable provenance, and transparent standpoint.
• Apply an OER ideation framework to design learning experiences that prioritise intentional human-centred design, educator presence, and rich context to complement AI-mediated learning.
• Recognise the critical role of trusted, human-curated OERs in sustaining the integrity and educational value of future generative AI learning ecosystems.
• Use the framework and toolkit to articulate and advocate for the value of human-curated OERs to colleagues, leaders, and institutional stakeholders in an AI-mediated learning environment.

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.