2026 Open Education Conference

Dr. Sian Proctor is a geoscientist, artist, astronaut, and educator best known as the pilot of the historic all-civilian Inspiration4 space mission. A former professor with the Maricopa Community Colleges, she spent more than 25 years teaching geology, sustainability, and planetary science while championing innovation in education. Dr. Proctor also served as the district’s Open Educational Resources (OER) Coordinator, helping expand access to affordable, high-quality learning materials and advancing initiatives that promoted equity, creativity, and student success through open education.
Dr. Proctor will explore this year's theme “The Space Between” drawing on a career that has navigated some genuinely unusual distances — from community college classrooms to Earth’s orbit — to ask what open education makes possible.

Dr. Bryan Alexander is an internationally known futurist, researcher, writer, speaker, consultant, and teacher, working in the field of higher education’s future. A few of Bryan’s award-winning titles include Academia Next: The Futures of Higher Education, and Universities on Fire: Higher Education in the Age of Climate Crisis. His latest book: Peak Higher Ed: How to Survive the Emerging Academic Crisis, forecasts what Higher Education might look like in the next decade if we continue down current paths. 

Exploring this year’s theme, “The Space Between”, Bryan’s keynote will address many of the major challenges facing academic institutions today and envision what the future might hold if we are able to work together to achieve our common goals.