2024 Open Education Conference

Beyond Cost Savings: Open Education as Resistance

Coming together for this first hybrid Open Education Conference provides an opportunity to celebrate the community’s accomplishments while also reflecting on where we are now: gathering amidst crises of climate change, wealth gaps, and declining trust in education and democracy. We will recall the early goal of Open Education to “have the freedom to use, customize, improve and redistribute educational resources without constraint.” (Cape Town Declaration, 2008) Today, in the face of platform capitalism and open-washing, this type of freedom can seem far away. By highlighting the Open for Antiracism Program and other community efforts to re-tool the master’s tools, we will show how practicing Open Education can be an act of resistance, driving social justice and crafting a community-informed vision of the future.