#OpenEd21

The Regional Leaders of Open Education Network (RLOE) is about building diverse human networks that center the perspectives of and shift power to the marginalized in order to create conditions for their voices to shape a new vision for open. We believe that open education can be a key lever in bringing justice to higher education and a razor sharp focus on supporting underserved and underrepresented student populations.

Framing our work with social justice and equity at the forefront, we seek to broaden our impacts and address the enormous systemic problems that inequity and racism bring to our students. Systemic problems need a huge variety of actors in every corner to combat them, therefore our leaders should come from a variety of institutions in a variety of institutional roles and with a variety of areas of influence. Integral to making systemic changes, we feel that it is important to continually question what leadership means.

In this panel the RLOE leadership team will bring their personal experiences and engage participants in an exploration of the following foundational questions:

What is justice for higher education? How can open education be a key lever in the justice we seek? Who has agency within our organizations and is empowered to make change? How do we nurture a diverse range of leaders that can help drive agendas for open education that focus on underserved students? Who are the leaders and future leaders? How do we empower leaders and help them grow to take the next steps towards equity and justice confidently? How do we make sure our organizations center our historically underrepresented and underestimated communities in open education? What expertise needs to be connected for big challenges that face our projects and organizations? How do our leadership development programs assist leaders to adapt open practices within their own spaces in order to most effectively impact the underserved students in their particular institutions?

After participating in this session, attendees will be able to:

• Question the future of leadership for Open Education.
• Identify strategies for recruiting, supporting and empowering underrepresented open education leaders (including student leaders).
• Explore open practices that can most effectively impact the underserved students in their particular institutions.

This session focuses on an example of capacity building opportunities offered by the Learning in a Digital Age 103 course from OER Foundation on “Open education, copyright and open licensing in a digital world”. Developed by Dr. Wayne Mackintosh at a New Zealand UNESCO Open Education Chair for the English-speaking world and Common Law countries, it has been translated into French by UNESCO and adapted to cover Civil Law countries by L’Université Numérique. It is not a law course per se, but it opens the minds of learners and authors to opportunities offered by various dimensions of “openness”, such as open access, OER and enables them to address the legal complexity faced by government bodies, schools and higher education institutions when they implement open education.

Building on this example, the session will demonstrate how cooperation between civil servants of Higher Education ministries, rectors/presidents of traditional universities and leaders of virtual universities can work together to jumpstart a national OER strategy in francophone Africa, extending first to lusophone Africa and Brazil, and on to hispanophone countries.

Its strengths:

• It is a free online capacity development course
• It provides free access to an online test, whereby successful learners have the opportunity to gain a Competency certificate
• It covers both Common Law and Civil Law countries
• It relies on a documented process, that is replicable in other languages, starting with Portuguese and Spanish
• It illustrates how an inclusive national OER strategy can be implemented, provided representatives from ministries of Higher Education, Education, professional training, Justice (licensing) and economics (trade negotiations on IPR) are involved in the process

Caveat: This approach focuses on building trust between governments and governing bodies in higher education for implementing the OER recommendation. While it is fundamental to build an inclusive national strategy that protects and fosters innovation, it is not a substitute for more disruptive approaches at the level of individual educators that is needed in order to mainstream the use of OER, which should come in a second stage.

After participating in this session, attendees will be able to:

• Understand the specific challenges for implementing the UNESCO OER recommendation in sub-Saharan francophone countries
• Understand the differences in approach to OER licensing between “common law” countries and “civil law countries”
• Understand how this approach to francophone countries, with a critical mass of OER that is substantially smaller than for English or Mandarin can apply to other audiences such as lusophone or hispanophone countries

In 2021, the New England Board of Higher Education (NEBHE) formed a regional Community of Practice (Co-OP) for faculty to learn about and implement open pedagogy into their courses through Lambert’s (2018) social justice framework.

With each of the Co-OP participants teaching in different academic disciplines, from both independent and public institutions of higher education located in each of the Northeastern states (CT, MA, ME, NH, NJ, NY, RI, VT), these 8 faculty members spent 6 months together virtually learning from experts in the field of Open Education about the best practices for inviting their students into the process of creating openly-licensed content in the form of renewable assignments. Copyright, open licenses, student agency, privacy, accessibility, racial justice, and culturally relevant teaching practices were all covered through webinars, workshops, and bi-weekly group discussions.

Join Lindsey Gumb, NEBHE’s Open Education Fellow, for a lively panel discussion in which our Co-OP participants share their own candid thoughts on topics like relinquishing their “Sage on the Stage” identities to empower their students as authoritative voices through open pedagogy, anxieties around incorporating discussions of race and white supremacy into their classroom discussions, the benefits of collaborating with regional colleagues, and how/if their students embraced the opportunity to license their intellectual property and contribute to the greater commons. Ample time for audience questions will be made available to ensure an inclusive and interactive experience for all.

After participating in this session, attendees will be able to:

• Visualize the real challenges and successes of faculty learning about and implementing open pedagogy through a social justice lens for the first time

K-12 Voices for Open is a community-led effort established in 2020 by ISKME, and in partnership with representatives from CAST, SETDA, New America, state, district, and other organizational leaders in open education across the U.S. The formation of K-12 Voices for Open is driven by the need to broaden engagement in K-12 open education by encouraging more diverse participation by practitioners, community members, and those with lived experience. This past year, K-12 Voices for Open has been working to establish priorities and concrete supports to enable increased participation in OER by educators and policymakers.

The session will feature a panel with members of K-12 Voices for Open, including district, state, and organizational leaders in open education to discuss pressing issues for the K-12 open education environment, and highlight the progress of the community's work in 2021, which has focused on four core areas: 1) OER professional learning, 2) OER curriculum vetting, 3) OER policy and advocacy, and 4) OER leadership and governance.

Panelists will reflect on K-12 open ed leadership and discuss the shared governance model and community workflows established by K-12 Voices for Open. Panelists will subsequently engage participants in the current priorities and outcomes from the the past year's work, including a written policy statement directed to states and particularly to district leaders to encourage the use of federal funds for OER; a statement of the community’s collective commitment to diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility; and a collection of quality rubrics and resources to support open educational practice and professional learning. The session will conclude with a discussion to gather audience feedback on outputs to date, as well as to inform the priorities of the K-12 Voices for Open going forward in 2022.

After participating in this session, attendees will be able to:

• Gain an understanding about the creation of a collaborative leadership and governance model, and will be able to generalize from this transferable model to apply to their own local open education context
• Learn how to get involved directly in the K-12 Voices for Open community and contribute to its goals and working group activities
• Be able to explain to others the benefits of the community and to supporting K-12 OER more broadly across states and districts
• Gain access to a set of shared resources, including guidelines and rubrics to support K-12 open ed practice, policy, and advocacy across state, local, and regional levels

The European Network of Open Education Librarians (ENOEL) is part of SPARC Europe’s efforts to make open the default for research and education in Europe. While some European Higher Education libraries have taken on the OE challenge, others are yet to do so. The network is there to help all those striving to support Open Education at different levels of maturity. As a result of a Hewlett Foundation grant, the network is focussing on activities to help implement the UNESCO OER Recommendation. It is growing fast with members from more than twenty European countries.

This session will focus on how a network can stimulate more international action with its members, speaking to how they are getting engaged in activities with their peers: driving experienced members to share their OE expertise and newcomers to connect and contribute while learning more about OE. The panel will bring together network members from different countries to share their experiences in developing a set of activities within the network itself, initiated and steered by them. They will also reflect on the specific context of an international, European network in which most of the members use English as a second language and come from diverse cultural and geographical backgrounds.

Presenters will describe the process and the results of activities that started in Spring 2021, including:

• Interviews with European Open Education Champions- librarians interview active OE advocates and practitioners: students, teachers, pedagogues, practitioners, talking about OE: why it is important, what they do to move this forward, what still needs to be done, and more
• ENOEL practitioners under the spotlight- members of the network share their experience as librarians and their specific applied OE expertise while enabling others to ask questions and consider replicating their practices
• OE drops- small chunks of knowledge on OE themes, issues, definitions, tips & tricks, etc. designed and recorded by members in a short (2-3 mins) video format
• Thematic Working Groups to 1)organize and curate OE resources for the network and the wider public in general; 2)design and share advocacy tools about the Unesco OER Recommendation; 3)build an Open Education learning path for EU librarians.
• Aside from sharing interim results, the panel will also provide ENOEL members the chance to share how they felt while facing ups and downs in these activities and how they managed to face challenges together. More details will be provided during the session.

After participating in this session, attendees will be able to:

• Recognize how to embrace similar opportunities and tackle similar challenges in their own network
• Identify and select tools and strategies to raise awareness of OE that can be adapted in other contexts
• Generate ideas to plan actions in their local contexts, keeping the effort required under control
• Consider the intangible results that come from international networking and recognize these as important achievements
• Value opportunities to explicitly share feelings and personal perceptions, whether positive or negative, as part of the experience of working collaboratively at a distance

There continues to be a dearth of OER in the foreign languages. This is even more acutely felt in the least commonly taught languages (LCTLs). LCTLs are a designation given by the US government to those languages not commonly taught in US public schools. Currently, there are 78 languages considered LCTLs with a majority of them taught at the college level.

For the past two years, the Michigan State University (MSU) Libraries OER Award Program has funded projects by our foreign language faculty most notably those teaching LCTLs. This presentation will showcase the work of four faculty who have created an interactive OER in Hindi, Urdu, Arabic, and Russian languages. We will highlight the collaboration between the OER librarian and the faculty OER Program awardees and how we have partnered together to create OER materials that are not only of the highest quality but are also aligned with the standards of the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL). True to our land-grant mission, the OER we have produced are centered on the student experience and how these materials can foster better, more engaged language learning for all learners not just at MSU but globally as well.

After participating in this session, attendees will be able to:

• Learn about OER in the least commonly taught languages
• Discover how interactivity is incorporated into the making of these OER
• Be inspired and get ideas about successful librarian-faculty collaboration

International Federation of Medical Students' Associations (IFMSA), representing 1.3 million medical students worldwide, is a firm proponent of the Open Education movement. IFMSA has solidified stances on Open Education in its two Policy Documents, ‘Open Access, Open Education, and Open Data’ and ‘Open Science’, and has committed to promoting the movement through its Global Priorities, activities, programs, and initiatives.

IFMSA has aimed to increase awareness of Open Science among medical students through the annual Open Access Week campaign and promoting NMO activities on Open Science. IFMSA has further created educational activity toolkits and introduced Open Educational Resources that can be useful to medical students. Along with these capacity-building efforts, IFMSA has strengthened the presence of students in events discussing Open, such as OpenCon and Open Education Conference 2020.

This session will feature panel discussion introducing the existing barriers that students face during their studies and research, why involving students in the Open movement is important, and local, national, and international efforts of students to advocate Open Education.

The panel will consist of student organization representatives who will introduce the existing barriers that students face during their studies and research, why involving students in the Open movement is important, and how they are spreading the idea through local, national and international efforts. They will also share his/her story of how being introduced to the Open Movement at an early stage in their career has impacted their paths and how to make the Open movement sustainable. Along with discussing the pre prepared questions, the panels will receive questions from the participants and provide specific advice to the students and mentors.

After participating in this session, attendees will be able to:

• Understand the importance and the impact of involving students in advocating the Open
• Understand student-led strategies to advocate Open Science and can implement them back in their local and national communities
• Share ideas on sustainable ways to spread the Open movement. 

Disclosure: This session was added to the program through special approval by the Steering Committee after the call for proposals closed.

Open Education programs of all sizes and contexts regularly require quantitative and qualitative data collection, analysis, and reporting in order to demonstrate their impact. This imperative goes far beyond cost savings; programs often measure (1) faculty and student opinions, (2) student enrollment, persistence, and performance, (3) the level of subject-area or departmental participation, (4) the success of a new outreach or professional development activity, (5) educational equity, and much more. In an emerging field, integrity, reproducibility, and clarity in open education data collection and reporting is crucial to a program’s success and sustainability. Moreover, our data enables us to widely share our stories in order to celebrate champions and draw attention to issues that deeply affect students.

This panel of Open Education leaders from institutions, state systems, and a global network will talk briefly about their past experiences in dealing with data, their current plans and strategies in collecting and managing data, and what the future of Open Education data could, or should, look like. Ending with a 25-minute Discovery-Action-Dialogue microsession from Liberating Structures through a collaborative Google Doc, the panel aims to balance panelists’ input with the experiences and knowledge of attendees.

After participating in this session, attendees will be able to:

• Identify common practices in Open Education data management
• Detect barriers to success in data collection and reporting
• Understand new ways of approaching Open Education data, both current and prospective

Academic integrity has been an increasing concern as courses moved online due to COVID-19. Academic misconduct is a challenge to equity, fairness, and learning. A team of experts will discuss the state of academic integrity today, the misunderstandings and behaviors that often lead to academic dishonesty, and solutions to keep students honest, engaged, and learning. The panel will introduce a framework for academic integrity designed to support faculty teaching and student learning. Normalizing academic integrity will require tremendous effort from the entire educational ecosystem, including advocates for OER. We will explore ways in which OER can evolve to provide resources supporting online learning, open pedagogy, and authentic assessments that can be used to better measure student understanding.

After participating in this session, attendees will be able to:

• Understand how open pedagogy, authentic assessments for OER content, and new OER resources can assist faculty in evaluating student understanding
• Appreciate how the challenge of academic integrity has accelerated during COVID-19
• Understanding of how technology has been leveraged by "for profit" companies to provide students of means access to solutions, essay writing, etc
• Walk away with three strategies on how OER can be used to enhance academic integrity

The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) is an independent agency of the United States federal government established in 1996. It is the main source of federal support for libraries and museums within the United States, having the mission to create strong libraries and museums that connect people with information and ideas.

IMLS over the past several years has strategically funded a wide variety of institutional types in the area of Open Education Resources (OER). IMLS’s efforts in OER have been to promote the use of technology and an “open” environment to enhance the quality and reach of museum, library, and educational resources.

This panel presentation, moderated by IMLS Program Officer in the Office of Library Services, James Neal, will consider the impact of several recently funded IMLS OER grants including David Ernst of the Open Education Network, Lisa Petrides of Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education (ISKME), Will Cross of North Carolina State University Libraries, and Ruth Hodges of South Carolina State University Libraries.

After participating in this session, attendees will be able to:

• Examine the types of OER grants funded by IMLS in recent years
• Examine best practices and lessons learned from OER grants funded by IMLS in recent years
• Learn how to apply for IMLS grants in OER

Since the final report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (2015), many of Canada’s post-secondary institutions have set intentions around decolonization. Participant institutions in Manitoba signed the Manitoba Collaborative Indigenous Education Blueprint (2015). Despite these frameworks calling for increased Indigeneity and decolonization of post-secondary institutions, the progress of resource development has been slow. In Brandon, Manitoba, Assiniboine Community College and Brandon University sought to appropriately educate faculty and staff in the histories of Indigenous Peoples, colonization, and decolonization. Through a series of serendipitous events, a collaborative group found a professional learning series: Pulling Together (2018 and ongoing). Published as an open educational resource through BCcampus in British Columbia, Canada, the series’ Foundations Guide (2018) was suitable for adaptation, so the group has taken on adapting the resource to reflect the histories, knowledges, languages, cultures, and geographies of the Indigenous Peoples of Manitoba. The adapted guide is an open resource published in Campus Manitoba’s repository. The decolonized process by which the group came together and developed the resource made use of the 4R’s of Indigenous Education (Kirkness & Brandhardt, 2001). This open resource honoured Indigenous knowledge, cultures, and ways of being while continually seeking to develop and nurture relationships with Indigenous communities to ensure content was valued and culturally appropriate. This process allowed both Indigenous and non-Indigenous contributors to learn together, throughout the project.

This panel presentation will include several members of the Manitoba Foundations Group who will describe how the process of building relationships and community was integral to decolonizing the resource. In the end, the content is, and the process was, Indigenous-forward, inclusive, and rooted in a spirit of collaboration and doing things “in a good way.” Panelists will speak on their experiences throughout the project, both the challenges and rewards of working in new ways, as well as discuss how these experiences can be adapted in other spaces and projects.

After participating in this session, attendees will be able to:

• Attendees will have the opportunity to learn about the necessity and value of relationship building when collaborating with Indigenous contributors on open projects
• Describe a collaborative and community-led open project that emphasized the centering of Indigenous voices and disinvest from linear project planning to allow time for reflection of information and knowledge
• Envision collaborative partnerships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous contributors on open projects with a focus on replacing Western interpretations of histories and processes with Indigenous perspectives and lived experiences

The Global OER Graduate Network (GO-GN) [1] is a network of doctoral students from around the world, whose research focuses on open education topics. GO-GN raises the profile of member research, connects and supports the membership and promotes openness as a form of research. Diversity, equity and inclusion are central to GO-GN’s work.

During the pandemic, GO-GN increased the range of activity and support it offered its membership, with the 2020 survey revealing 71% of respondents felt the network had supported them “very well” over the year [2]. New activity over this period included collaborative publications, online mini-seminars to replace previously planned face-to-face activity and increased support for members to participate in conferences and other initiatives. Outputs such as the Research Methods Handbook, for example, received acknowledgement and positive feedback from the wider open education community and has been downloaded more than 8500 times.

The GO-GN community is broad and includes experts, supervisors, students and others with an interest in the network’s work and open education more broadly. Whilst the GO-GN community is viewed by members as the most important feature of the network [3] and our work during the pandemic developed this connection further, there exists further scope for deepening the network’s relationship to the wider open education community.

To both highlight the work of our membership and further develop our relationship to the wider open education community, we are proposing an interactive session for the Open Education conference. The session comprises three parts. The first is an interactive Gasta style session [4] showcasing a diverse range of GO-GN doctoral student research in the form of 5 minute presentations (25 minutes).

The second will focus on collaborative activity to help shape a forthcoming GO-GN collaborative output (15 minutes). Finally, the third part of our session will give the wider community the opportunity to help shape the next phase of GO-GN (15 minutes). As we approach our 10 year anniversary , and begin to develop plans for our next phase, we will be undertaking a series of activities with both GO-GN members and the wider open education community to gather feedback on how GO-GN can best serve its membership and the open education community going forward.

The session will produce a number of collaborative outputs and actions that will be taken forward by GO-GN with the wider community and GO-GN network during 2022 and beyond.

After participating in this session, attendees will be able to:

• Have gained insight into the latest international doctoral research on open education topics
• Have the opportunity to help shape how GO-GN can best serve its membership and the wider community going forward
• Have the opportunity to contribute to both a collaborative output and get involved in the network

Open educational practices (OEP) have seen a significant growth in integration in Canadian post-secondary institutions in the past decade. It began in British Columbia and the ripple effects have brought the creation, adaptation, and adoption of OER and other OEP across the Rockies, through the Prairies and Central Canada, to the North, and to the shores of Atlantic Canada. And we’ve done this without a federal Department of Education.

Each provinces’ and territories’ work on OEP is unique to their region and circumstances. While British Columbia, Manitoba, and Ontario have central organizations (BCcampus, CampusManitoba, and eCampus Ontario respectfully), others have launched, and are sustaining, OEP initiatives at the individual institutional level.

Even with these differences, cross institution and Canada-wide collaborations have been occurring. Resources are shared widely and there are monthly virtual meetings of leaders in open from across the country where we share current projects and look for opportunities to assist and partner with one another.

This panel will be feature some OE leaders from across Canada who will share the challenges, successes, and vital partnerships that have been formed to improve access to, and the quality of, educational materials for students in post-secondary institutions throughout Canada.

After participating in this session, attendees will be able to:

• Understand the challenges, successes, and vital partnerships that have been formed to improve access to, and the quality of, educational materials for students in post-secondary institutions throughout Canada
• Describe the open education practices occurring in Canada
• Understand each provinces’ and territories’ work on OEP is unique to their region and circumstances and be able to describe the uniqueness

Collected links from the session

Join the Midwestern Higher Education Compact (MHEC), New England Board of Higher Education (NEBHE), Southern Regional Education Board (SREB), and the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education (WICHE) in a conversation to learn more about each compact's regional priorities to promote educational equity-through the use of OER and open pedagogy-in multi-state regions. Also learn how the regional compacts are working together as NCOER to encourage national scaling of OER and Open Practices in higher education and K-12.

The four regional compacts, which represent a diverse range of state universities and systems, community colleges, minority serving institutions, and independent institutions have joined together to form the National Consortium for OER (NCOER) to scale equitable OER policy, research, and practice. Compacts are known for and have success implementing large-scale educational change that improves education for all students. The success of NCOER hinges on regional expertise, trusting relationships, care, empowerment, and the diversity of voices as we research, learn, and share best practices together. Everyone is invited to participate, contribute, and learn!

After participating in this session, attendees will be able to:

• Understand what a regional compact is and how the regional compacts work together as NCOER
• Learn how regional compacts may help reduce the obstacles and challenges OER advocates face as they persuade instructional faculty, administrators, and politicians to support their OER efforts
• Learn how to get involved and participate in NCOER
• Have a deep understanding of the individual compact priorities and newest strategies and research for OER policy, cost savings, teaching and learning, equity, etc

Join our panel to hear from a diverse group of dedicated Canadian student OER champions on the work they have done to promote OER throughout our various post-secondary institutions. In recognition of the varied strategies and approaches student groups and associations have taken in relation to this work, we are proposing an Advocacy and Allyship panel, which would provide a space for us as student leaders from across the country to share a) our successful initiatives, b) the challenges we faced, c) our approach towards collaboration, d) our hopes for OER in the future.

We also hope to share some actionable steps that you as OER champions from the library, teaching, and administrative side can do to include student voices in Open Ed discussions moving forward!

OERs have become a huge advocacy point for many students and student organizations over the past few years. Students from different institutions have been working hard to champion OER in hopes of enhancing accessibility, affordability, and quality of instruction for their schools.

Across Canada, the rising cost of textbooks, tuition increases, and the COVID-19 Pandemic have only increased the barriers students face when trying to get their education, and thus, made the need for OER more urgent. When confronted with the synergistic attacks on accessibility, students have created deep and meaningful relationships with various stakeholders on campus such as librarians, teaching support staff, administrators, and more to make the case for Open Ed.

Because Canada has no federal department of education, student advocacy initiatives take on different approaches across various institutions and provinces. As a result, many successful initiatives like the creation of an OER granting competition, the creation of an OER student librarian position, regional OER repositories, new institutional awards recognizing excellence in OpenEd, #TextbookBroke campaigns, creating OER for use in classes, and many more have been started.

We hope you join our panel to hear about the exciting work we have been engaging with, and to ask any questions that you might have on strategies to invite student leaders to be a part of OpenEd conversations!

After participating in this session, attendees will be able to:

• Understand the exciting work Canadian students have been doing to pursue increased OER adoption
• Understand the collaborative nature of student OER advocacy
• Learn strategies to engage with student leaders in your own institutions

As many OER, OEP, and open pedagogy scholars have noted, OER at first took precedence over open pedagogy. With the increase in instructors’ adopting OER has come a more interactive relationship in OER and open pedagogy. While early adopters of OER embraced its support of and usefulness to students, these instructors may not have immediately considered the learning and teaching opportunities for both students and instructors that OER offered through open pedagogy. This panel will consider what open access means to instructors and what are its incentives to instructors as well as to their students. In order to facilitate the adoption of OER, it will also consider resources and methods for practicing open pedagogy in instructors' current and future courses.

After reviewing best practices in open pedagogy, the panel will examine how some of these practices can be used to customize available OER to heighten the salience of instructors’ course goals and learning objectives. The panel will model such customization with ancillary material developed in conjunction with editing British Literature II: Romantic Era to the Twentieth Century and Beyond, an open anthology published by the University of North Georgia Press in partnership with eCore and Affordable Learning Georgia (ALG). This discussion will be augmented with the learning activities, templates, formatting, and conversion practices of the ALG grant-supported ancillary material currently being developed for World History: Cultures, States, and Societies to 1500, an open textbook also published by the University of North Georgia Press in partnership with eCore and ALG. These models, methods, and templates intend to provide resources for other OER-based ancillaries for additional OER adoptions.

After participating in this session, attendees will be able to:

• Locate, access, and evaluate discipline-specific OER
• Identify needs in the effectiveness of discipline-specific OER for instructors' course outcomes and learning goals
• Learn open pedagogical methods and resources
• Learn best practices for open pedagogy
• Learn to use open pedagogy so discipline-specific OER will meet instructors' course outcomes and learning goals

This session was cancelled due to a speaker conflict. If it is rescheduled, more information will be posted here. 

Policy is one of the key ingredients for sustainable, effective open education efforts. More than a decade of coordinated open education advocacy has paid off with significant advancements. In the United States, Congress has established a federal grant program for open textbook programs, and numerous significant state-level policy initiatives have led to increased adoption, awareness, and creation of open educational resources. In Canada, sustained provincial support for open education programs has laid groundwork for potential national action. Across North America and the world, the opportunity around open education policy has been underscored by the COVID-19 pandemic.

This session will provide attendees with an overview of open education policy in the U.S. and Canada led by experienced advocates engaged in the day-to-day work. We’ll review exciting developments from the past year and provide a look into what goes into big policy wins, along with analysis of what the long-term impact of these policies will be. We’ll also share insight into what’s coming up in the next year, including the outlook on potential national developments, which state and provincial policy trends to watch, and how open education advocates can best take action in their communities.

The discussion will be enriched by including both the U.S. and Canadian perspectives, drawing analysis and lessons learned from both contexts. Speakers also have their roots in student advocacy, so particular emphasis will be given to the important role of students in advancing policy. Whether you are an experienced advocate or completely new to policy, we hope you will participate!

After participating in this session, attendees will be able to:

• Explain key open education-related policy trends throughout the United States and Canada
• Identify upcoming open education policy opportunities that may emerge in the next year
• Apply recommendations and resources for how to advance open education policy in your local context
• Reflect on key differences in policy development between the American and Canadian contexts

The Texas Digital Library (TDL) is a collaborative consortium based in Texas and rooted in higher education. Texas Digital Library builds capacity among its membership for ensuring equitable access to and preservation of digital content of value to research, instruction, cultural heritage, and institutional memory. In 2020, TDL expanded its services to include support for Open Educational Resources (OER). Charged with developing a Community of Practice, TDL’s OER Ambassador program provides a forum for member libraries to discuss and share challenges and achievements around OER initiatives that impact student success, retention, graduation rates, and the cost of higher education for college students in Texas.

In this panel discussion, OER Ambassadors will share their experience developing this Community of Practice and the process of starting an OER initiative from the ground up at their respective Texas institutions. With a focus on the problems and hurdles each faced in building an OER program, the panelists will provide a peek behind the scenes of three OER initiatives, share missteps and issues encountered, and speak to the need for progress, not perfection. Panelists will also engage with attendees in order to crowdsource solutions to challenges. This is a great panel for OER advocates at any stage of implementation: from beginner to advanced.

After participating in this session, attendees will be able to:

• Identify potential hurdles and challenges in starting a new OER initiative
• Share solutions in response to OER initiative flops or failures
• Understand the benefits of sharing with a community of OER colleagues

Slides available here: www.bitly.com/OpenEd21-the-long-game

While the OpenEd movement has gained immense traction through the successes of librarians, instructional designers, and professors, we are keenly interested in the labor of others who may fall outside of these roles. We want to call attention to what we are provisionally calling ‘ancillary’ workers: enablers of OpenEd who occupy non-teaching, administrative, or newly defined support roles in or adjacent to institutions for learning. These are workers who thread through OpenEd projects without necessarily being the ‘creators’ themselves. We call attention to these people in order to anticipate and proactively address the longer-term sustainability of the OpenEd movement.

We are both raising the question for our own vested interests as well as for the greater OpenEd movement writ large: “What’s the long-game for those of us who are in it now?” Rather than take an alarmist approach to such a question, we present four perspectives that nuance the types of considerations that may be overlooked in the grand scheme of OpenEd advocacy. (See note below in bold.)

Specifically we will examine the following dimensions:

• Beyond the question of who gets involved, we ask who stays? Rather, who is enabled to stay, and to thrive?
• How are individuals retained, recognized, and rewarded for their roles?
• What are the structural considerations of how positions are created, framed, termed?

 
Some of the topics that we aim to discuss include:

1. credentials and the limited pathways for growth / advancement
2. job security and strategic realignment to create supportive structures
3. the efficacy of OpenEd messaging especially with regards to retaining newcomers

*NB. We will only record the first half of our presentation when we will share some of our insights and experiences. WE WILL NOT BE RECORDING THE SECOND PORTION, WHEN WE OPEN THE CONVERSATION UP FOR DISCUSSION AMONGST THE ATTENDEES. We will also provide opportunities for folks to contribute ANONYMOUSLY if they so wish. It is our sincere hope that these considerations will help encourage candid conversation amidst session attendees.*

Given that pandemic and economic concerns have welcomed an influx of newcomers to the OpenEd community, we critically and earnestly raise the question of retention in an effort to flesh out the long-game of OpenEd advocacy.

We anticipate the session to begin with identifying the challenges (based on the presenters’ insights), and then open it up to discussion (in non-recorded and/or anonymous formats). We hope the discussion will be candid and ideational, and include perspectives of both workers and stakeholders/employers/managers. While we hope that our discussion will help us to generate potential strategies/tactics to bring to decision-makers, we are more interested in drawing attention to the sustainability of the OpenEd movement if it cannot support the people it needs most.

After participating in this session, attendees will be able to:

1. Recognize at least one existing/anticipated challenge that ‘ancillary’ workers to OpenEd uniquely face
2. Relate to the presenters’ challenges and/or provide their own examples
   2a. If the attendee identifies as an ancillary worker, we invite them to anonymously express at least one challenge they face
   2b. If the attendee employs an ancillary worker, we invite them to predict at least one challenge that may specifically affect one of their ancillary workers
     2c. If the attendee identifies as neither ancillary worker or employer, we invite them to pose queries that the session may have overlooked
3. Generate potential strategies and tactics to present to decision-makers in OpenEd

The facilitators of this workshop are in the process of organizing an open access journal special issue of the Journal for Multicultural Education (JME) devoted to the intersections between open educational practices (OEP) and equity pedagogy. Broadly defined, OEP includes open pedagogies and open sharing of teaching practices, as well as the creation, use, and remixing of OER (Cronin, 2017) through collaborative learning processes, knowledge creation, and learner empowerment. Equity pedagogy centers the student and recognizes that teaching is a multicultural encounter where the complexity of students’ lived experiences (e.g., cultural, racial, ethnic, gender identity, abilities, etc.) enrich the classroom (McGee Banks & Banks, 1995). At the intersection of OEP and equity pedagogy, students openly contribute to a global community of learners who acquire, interrogate, reconstruct, and produce knowledge. (McGee Banks & Banks, 1995).

Over the last two decades, the benefits of open education have been heralded as reduced textbook costs in higher education (Hilton et al., 2014) and widened access to knowledge (Feldstein et al., 2012). However, open education is at an inflection point. Lambert’s (2018) analysis of open education through the social justice principles of redistributive, recognitive, representational justice emphasizes the need for intentional, rather than implied social justice in open education. Equity pedagogy provides a lens to examine how open educators achieve recognitive and representational forms of social justice through OEP. While current discussions of open education and social justice focus on theory and lenses from diverse voices in nontraditional formats (Bali et al., 2020; Lambert & Czerniewicz, 2020), we seek to further facilitate discussions around pedagogical applications, particularly in primary and secondary education as well as higher education.

In preparation for a special issue titled Intersections of Open Education and Equity Pedagogy in JME, this open space session is designed to bring together potential authors to share ideas, develop outlines, and plan for manuscript contributions to the special issue or other publishing opportunities. This interactive session will define equity pedagogy, encourage discussions about the intersections of open educational practices and equity pedagogy, and clarify the goals and submissions process for the special issue. In addition, we will facilitate an extended workspace to foster collaborations and informal discussion among attendees and with the editors.  Participants will be provided time to brainstorm potential manuscript ideas for submission to the special issue and form collaborations in breakout groups during the session.

After participating in this session, attendees will be able to:

• Understand equity pedagogy
• Examine connections between equity pedagogy and open educational practices
• Understand the goals of the JME special issue and submissions process
• Develop initial ideas of how potential practices and research projects might be appropriate for the special issue
• Develop outlines and plan for manuscript contributions

All attendees at OpenEd, especially those unable to attend our session, are invited to explore our JME Special Issue Padlet with information about the special issue, linked resources for conceptualizing the call, and a brainstorming and collaboration space for potential authors.  If you are interested in being a reviewer for the special issue, please complete this short form.  

We look forward to collaborating with you!

Students are at the heart of the open education movement. The importance of supporting, engaging, and partnering with students is a common thread through all of this year's conference topics, from pedagogy to collaboration to equity. However, not everyone knows where to start in terms of engaging and empowering students in open education work.

Financial and access barriers have become increasingly relevant for students who choose to pursue post-secondary education. Student advocates are engaged in the fight on the ground, but their terms are often short and cover many different priorities and platforms. While this reality has become normative across higher education, student advocates are continuing to seek solutions to reducing these financial burdens.

This panel allows attendees to hear from past student advocates that led open education projects on their campus. It offers other stakeholder groups a chance to better understand how to support and uplift student voices. By encouraging librarians, faculty members, and other institutional staff to involve students in their open education advocacy, we hope to inspire a movement that continues to reach new advocates and that supports sustainable student-led initiatives year after year.

This session is designed to equip campus leaders across all stakeholder groups with the tools to encourage students to take an active role in their own advocacy at their respective institutions. The panelists will share their experiences as former student advocates on their respective campuses in both Canada and the United States, as well as their insights on what the future of student advocacy within the open education space might look like. During the summation period, participants will engage directly with former student advocates in reflective discourse that inspires participants to discuss how emerging themes can be implemented at their respective institutions.

After participating in this session, attendees will be able to:

• Reflect on the barriers (financial or otherwise) that students face when accessing course materials
• Consider strategies for empowering and uplifting student advocates
• Apply best practices for maintaining a sustained and effective partnership with student advocates to achieve shared advocacy goals