Day 2: Cross-Regional Panel Discussion: Open Education Opportunities, Challenges, and Future Directions

OEGconnect · December 15, 2025, 10:39pm

Panelists and summaries for the discussions around open education in North America.

Recording Now Available

Nicole Allen, Director of Open Education at SPARC, Washington DC, USA
Shinta Hernandez, Dean of MC Online and Academic Support with Montgomery College and the past CCCOER Executive Council President, Maryland, USA
Leticia Kanywuiro, M.Ed. student and Research Assistant at Thompson Rivers University, British Columbia, Canada
Andrea Scott, Director of Open Educational Resources with Salt Lake Community College and CCCOER Executive Council President, Utah, USA

Embracing Diversity: Highly diverse institutions (e.g., Montgomery College, serving students from 165 countries) offer natural opportunities to embrace Open Pedagogy and showcase diverse perspectives.
Public Good and Student Impact: OE offers value beyond cost savings by functioning as a public good. Individuals can have a direct impact on students’ lives through adopting OER to save them money, engaging in open pedagogy, or developing more relevant and culturally sensitive resources.
Community Contribution: OE projects enable students to give back to their communities, such as developing websites for the preservation of indigenous culture.

Sustainability and Scalability: Maintaining and growing OE programs in large institutions and finding viable, long-term funding streams beyond grants and state funding. Salt Lake Community College shared a model incorporating grant funding, institutional funding, and a small materials fee to ensure sustainability and equitable pay for faculty work.
Faculty Recognition: Lacking institutional structure to formally acknowledge and elevate the significant amount of work faculty put into creating and adapting OERs.
External Pressures in the US: OE work is impacted by broader challenges, including shifting funding and restrictions on the use of language around diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Authentic Cultural Representation: The difficulty in developing OER that authentically and comprehensively represents diverse communities (e.g., multiple tribes and dialects), especially when resources are based on oral traditional knowledge. This requires extensive community networking and verification to avoid misinterpretation, exploitation, or misrepresentation.

Panelists discussed the need for OE to evolve and assert its relevance amidst technological and societal shifts.

Liberating Learning: The future of OE is about equitable learning opportunities for all, seeing students as co-creators of knowledge, and fostering global partnerships.
Addressing Commercial Competition: OE must define itself against the commercial market’s response, which includes automatic textbook billing programs and the embedding of proprietary online homework systems.
Broader Relevance: OE needs to expand its focus beyond core OER/Open Pedagogy to areas like workforce education, micro-credentials, adult education, and prison education.
Shared Responsibility and Inclusivity: The future emphasizes shared authorship, shared ownership, and shared responsibility. It must ensure inclusivity through accessibility features and also has the potential to create employment opportunities (e.g., hiring illustrators with grant money).

The panel addressed the intersection of OE and Generative AI:

Partnership, Not Replacement: Gen AI should be viewed as a partner and a springboard for critical thinking and digital literacy, not a replacement for Open Education.
Ethical Concerns: OE must define its stance on Gen AI, addressing accompanying challenges like attribution, copyright, knowledge theft, biased algorithms, and indigenous erasure.
The Role of Institutions: Higher education institutions must support this integration by offering necessary professional development to help educators become effective collaborators with AI.

General Calendar plus links to daily events

Main Space virtual lobby for the Tour
Welcome Greeting and Meeting
Tour Information How to Participate, What to See and Do