Beyond the Desk – Open Education Conference

Our second post in our new series, Beyond the Desk: Learning Together, Serving Better, features Jackson Harper, Open Education Resources (OER) Librarian at UND. The series aims to highlight the professional development activities our library staff engage in. Through these stories, we’ll share insights on how these experiences keep our team informed of the latest trends in academic libraries and improve the services and expertise we provide to our community.

The Open Education Conference was held this year from October 28 to 30 in Denver, Colorado, but I was one of many participants who attended virtually. While some events were exclusively in-person, or at least much easier to engage with that way, others were hybrid or fully online.

This was my first time attending the Open Education Conference, yet it felt familiar in many ways to the regional open education summits I’ve attended before. Community colleges, for example, were strongly represented. While these institutions are often less central to academic librarianship conversations, they remain some of the strongest advocates for open educational resources. Canadian institutions were also particularly visible, especially those in British Columbia, which, in my experience, have been especially vocal champions of open education.

I was, however, surprised to see so many student advocates in attendance. Open pedagogy advocates often talk about OER’s potential to empower students, but I had never attended a conference so intentional about giving students multiple opportunities to speak for themselves. I was also struck by how many attendees were brand new to OER. Biased by my own perspective, I assumed that “OER 101” sessions wouldn’t draw crowds, but I met participants whose primary goal was to build the foundational skills they need to start an OER program from scratch at their institutions.

The presentations I attended ranged from strategies for strengthening library course reserves to a program supporting French-language OER at an Anglophone Canadian university. Sessions varied in scope as well. Some were grounded in local initiatives, others examined regional advocacy campaigns, and a few compared national approaches to OER.

Identifying every interesting point or argument from the conference would take more space than this series allows, especially since there are several pre-recorded sessions I still want to watch! Instead, I’ll highlight two themes that stood out:

• A strong emphasis on the pedagogical value of OER. One panelist suggested that as commercial publishers develop new pricing models, OER initiatives become harder to justify purely as a means to reduce the cost of a college education. Open education advocates at this conference leaned more heavily into OER’s potential to change what teaching and learning look like. Which leads to my second theme—
• A greater willingness to take confrontational approaches. Many attendees voiced concern about state and federal policies hostile to diversity and inclusion—policies that often overlap with open pedagogy work. Others were frustrated by administrators who embrace automatic textbook billing because it looks efficient, even when it limits the growth of OER. Some presenters took a pragmatic stance: we can’t only collaborate with people who share our philosophy. Others were ready to move ahead without consensus, accepting that there will be resistance.

In the coming months, I hope to revisit how I present OER to faculty and explore how we could invite students to participate more fully in both the classroom and the OER development process. The conference reminded me that open education requires continual reflection on the strategies we use and the goals we’re working toward.