2024 Open Education Conference

Open Education work is typically categorized in one of two ways: either it's not explicitly outlined in your job description, yet you recognize its relevance across all roles, or it constitutes the primary focus of your job, necessitating communication with leaders, boards, and community partners to ensure its value and sustainability. In either case, how do you convey how open education functions within your position? Join us for a facilitated discussion where the presenters will share their experiences integrating open education effectively within their roles. Learn strategies for marketing open education to your department, organization, or community, and discover how to build connections that highlight its value in your specific context. These connections serve as a form of self- advocacy and self care, fostering understanding and community engagement with open education.

Attendees of this session will be able to:

• Discuss approaches to explicitly make connections between the value of open education and your role for relevant parties
• Identify strategies to advocate for your open education work
• Reflect on your current workload and consider where open education fits most effectively with your role

The Community College Consortium for OER at Open Education Global is a community of practice for educators aspiring to expand access and empower students, particularly those who are marginalized. To encourage this collaboration, the panel will spotlight open education programs that prioritize the creation of equitable, inclusive, and antiracist learning through the use of open pedagogy and instructional design, with dedicated faculty, equity consultants, and advisory coaches, to name a few. The featured programs include the Remixing Open Textbooks through an Equity Lens project (ROTEL) from Massachusetts, the Open for Antiracism program (OFAR) from California, and the Targeted Pathways project from Oregon. Two of the three programs involve both universities and community colleges, while one focuses on community colleges alone. Attendees will be prompted to identify components of the programs they can incorporate into their own work and institutions through polls and discussion.

Attendees of this session will be able to:

• Identify aspects of the highlighted programs that they can implement at their own institutions to focus on the need for equity, inclusion, and antiracism in OER.
• Gain insight into the structure of EDI open programs that demonstrate unique and collaborative approaches.

* As the shift to subscription models accelerates and as platforms, tools, and content are tied together, how do we prevent open educational resources from being excluded? * How can institutions committed to equity and open education offer tools, platforms and models from within the open community to compete with closed models? * What is the positive agenda for members in the open educational community in the context of the growth and adoption of big tech artificial intelligence tools? What policies and implementation choices matter to enable openness and advocate for an equitable system of access to knowledge?

Attendees of this session will be able to:

• Understand what policy and implementation choices are available to mitigate the impact of subscription models and to support existing OER programs
• What are the opportunities for an barriers to the creation of tools, including specific purpose AI tools within the open community to provide for an alternative to commercial tools.
• What are the policies and advocacy opportunities for members of the open community to support more equitable access to knowledge from their specific professional communities within education, research and librarianship?

The intersection of artificial intelligence (AI) and open educational resources (OER) holds significant potential for transforming education and scaling innovation. This presentation will offer an overview of the existing scholarly literature to describe the current landscape, including the opinions, opportunities, challenges, risks, and emerging trends. AI can play a pivotal role in enhancing the adoption, adaption, and authorship of OER, both through small experiments and larger theoretical discussions. However, AI also presents challenges and risks, including data privacy concerns, algorithmic bias, and ethical implications, in addition to a broader potential impact on intellectual property rights and sustainability of the OER ecosystems. This overview will provide takeaways on the intersection between AI and OER, informing future strategies for leveraging their combined potential to drive innovation and accessibility in education and as a way to scale impact for the Open Movement.

Attendees of this session will be able to:

• Summarize themes, trends, and remaining questions from existing literature on the intersection between AI and OER
• Recognize the challenges and risks associated with AI, including concerns about privacy, bias, and ethics
• Consider the evolving landscape of educational technology research on how AI could support and enhance the adoption, adaption, or authorship of OER
• Identify ways that AI could drive innovation toward program development in open education

Winning friends and influencing others is a useful skill in open education, and doing so among executive leaders can prove invaluable for OER advocates working to secure support, funding, and sustainability for open education projects. This panel session brings together seasoned OER champions who have achieved success in educating and managing upward—building productive alliances with executive leaders to align priorities and advance open education. Representing diverse zones of influence, operating styles, institution types, and populations served by their organizations, panelists will share proven strategies and lessons learned about how to effectively engage institutional leadership to support long-term open education initiatives when institutional priorities, resources, and leadership are liable to change. To capture and promote community wisdom, this session will use an “open fishbowl” structure to invite participants to join the conversation and share their collective expertise.

Attendees of this session will be able to:

• Identify advantageous executive leadership alliances that productively advance the interests of open education
• Implement practical tools and best practices for growing open education advocacy in the contexts of their own institutions, to enhance the effectiveness of their OER initiatives
• Align OER initiatives with institutional goals and priorities to sustain support, Increase visibility, and maintain representation for open education at the decision-making table
• Apply strategies for adapting to leadership transitions and ensure continued support and advocacy for OER projects with new leaders