Oregon community college and university representatives attended and presented at the 2026 OEGlobal Conference. This conference is an annual event where educators, researchers, and policymakers worldwide gather to share advances in open education.
Conference Takeaways
Here are some of the takeaways that Oregon attendees are thinking about after the event.
Three key takeaways! 1. I was both surprised and inspired by the degree to which OER is exponentially expanding internationally as well as collaboratively to beyond traditional academic institutions. 2. I was surprised both by the extent and the creativity of student derived OER initiatives. 3. AI intrigue was a theme in many sessions and included some thought provoking discussions regarding its application for creating and remixing OER. –Sharon Methvin, Mt. Hood Community College
Since the conference I have been thinking about issues of sustainability, maintenance, and provenance regarding the OER in our college collection, while also respecting and encouraging their dynamic nature as electronic resources. –Kevin Moore, Mt. Hood Community College
The topics and different perspectives at this conference were refreshing! Since I attended quite a few panels and sessions with specific deliverables already being worked on, rather than theoretical, I really enjoyed feeling validated as I heard struggles and successes that I am dealing with myself. There was one session on day three for example that did talk about how faculty buy-in of OER is still struggling because the textbook publishers provide streamlined grading opportunities like quiz banks and possible auto graded assignments that faculty utilize and want more of. As someone who is switching courses to OER slowly, I am also trying to find ways to create my own quizzes within the time and resources provided. :) –Amanda K. Miller, Central Oregon Community College
Open education practitioners are some of the hardest working, most values-driven education professionals I’ve encountered. They’re relentlessly committed to centering values in all conversations, which often put them in tension with the steamrolling forward movement of GenAI in education, society, and industry. The commitment to the public good means serving everyone (Meredith Jacobs quote), and open ed refuses to leave anyone behind. Open education has always sought to drive innovation and sharing forward, yet in the age of AI, this looks very different and currently involves lots of red lights, brakes, and off-ramps. –Colleen Sanders, Linn-Benton Community College
I enjoyed the conference and open discussion about the future of education with some clear ideas how we should be moving forward. It was inspiring to listen to the Resident Poet at MIT speaking about stillness and classrooms without walls. The student panel was really helpful to see the issues from their perspective. One of the sessions I could not watch in full but wished to was the Feminist Pedagogy – such a crucial and paramount approach that needs to not be downplayed if we are to create inclusive and caring spaces. –Anonymous
Presentations
Oregonians were represented on the program. Here are the presentation materials created by our colleagues:
Who Maintains the Commons? A Hybrid Panel on Hacking OER for Shared Stewardship, Nancy A. Henke, University of Colorado Denver; Cheryl Casey and Diana Daly, University of Arizona; Başak Büyükçelen, Pressbooks; and Amy Hofer, Open Oregon Educational Resources
If open educational resources are to serve the public good in fields where knowledge shifts from semester to semester, we must stop treating them like books and start treating them as commons that require ongoing care. This hybrid panel brings together OER authors, administrators, and platform developers to hash out what it would actually take to build infrastructures for shared maintenance and governance—economically, technologically, and culturally. Our starting provocation comes from recently published work on OER as dynamic digital commons (Daly, Ahmad, & Schneider, 2026). The panel uses that work as a shared reference point, but panelists will bring their own experiences to bear from authoring, administering, and building the tools that hold OER together.
Three clusters of questions will structure the conversation.
First, on economic flows: why does funding still stop at creation and one-way adoption, and what would it look like for grants, consortial dues, or platforms like Open Collective to sustain maintenance labor over years rather than weeks?
Second, on technology: current OER platforms are designed for publication and adaptation rather than collaboration, lacking the version control, upstream contribution, and contributor identification features that open source communities rely on. What would it take for platforms to integrate these affordances without losing the accessibility that has made tools like Pressbooks successful?
Third, on culture: how do we shift adopter expectations from passive reading to active participation, and what role should governance documents inside OER themselves play in signaling that shift?
Audience engagement is central to the session design. After brief opening positions from each panelist (roughly fifteen minutes total), the moderator will open the floor using a hybrid-friendly format that blends live microphone questions with a shared online document and chat channel, so that in-person and remote attendees contribute on equal footing. We will pose two or three targeted prompts to the audience, for example, asking participants to name one maintenance obstacle they have encountered in their own work, and feed responses back into the panel discussion live.
By the end of the session, attendees will have heard multiple grounded perspectives on challenges to OER maintenance, a working vocabulary for discussing OER as dynamic digital commons, and a short list of concrete next steps they can bring back to their own institutions, platforms, and funding bodies.
Compensating the Creator: Four Grant Models of Tiered OER Support, Emily Helton, Private Academic Library Network of Indiana (PALNI); Amy Hofer, Open Oregon Educational Resources; Sabrina Davis, Texas Tech University; and Hans Aagard, Boise State University
While OER provides immediate cost savings for students, the creation of those materials still requires labor. To more fairly compensate the authors of OER textbooks, ancillary materials, and open pedagogy assignments, many institutions have created grant initiatives to subsidize faculty work encouraging the creation of OER (Finlay, 2024). This presentation will examine four programs at U.S. institutions that take a tiered approach to faculty incentives. This will allow others to learn from existing initiatives and potentially design or update their own.
After reviewing the programs, we will analyze program design, student outcomes, and propose best practices for tiered OER grant programs. Programs analyzed include Boise State University; Texas Tech University; Open Oregon Educational Resources, a state-level organization; and the Private Academic Library Network of Indiana (PALNI), a library consortium. Each of these grant initiatives offers instruction to faculty on OER and open pedagogy, as well as having at least three tiers of available funding for adopting, revising, remixing, and creating materials. While they differ in the specific types of activities at each tier, all four programs include options for adopting OER as is, creating your own, and adapting a course to be no- or low-cost to students. To support this, all of the programs require some form of professional learning opportunity for participants, though they vary in terms of the types and degree required. This is a necessary element for faculty who may be unaware of the complex nuances of copyright, licensing, and sharing OER (Elder & Gallant, 2022). By reviewing two university programs and two organizations that serve multiple universities, we create a roadmap of scaffolded OER incentive programs relevant to the whole of the OER community.
By examining the existing landscape of these programs, including what types of activities they fund, how they prioritize adoption versus creation, how long they have been in place, and what metrics they report on, we will be able to identify trends and best practices that will inform an ideal OER faculty incentive program. One key element we will examine in each program is the extent to which the institution encourages collaboration among participants. Is there an opportunity to collaborate with other practitioners and support one another in the OER adoption and creation process, potentially beyond the duration of the grants?
Each OER initiative faces successes and challenges, but educators are more successful in OER practices when exposed to community groups and support from the OER community (Boyle, 2023). Having the opportunity to collaborate allows for human connection, fostering creativity and curiosity. Just as we can use the cost-saving nature of OER to open conversations around student engagement, agency, and voice in the classroom through open pedagogy, by funding faculty work around OER in an environment that fosters collaboration outside of traditional academic silos, we can spark new connections and ideas.
