Choosing What’s Next: National Priorities for Open Education

For the last twenty years, the open education movement in U.S. higher education built its case as a solution to the problem of expensive, traditional textbooks. Through the hard work of a broad field, thousands of institutions have engaged with OER, dozens of states have passed policies, and students have saved billions of dollars. A growing body of research documents the impact on affordability and student success, leading to the recent recognition of OER as a high-impact practice.

The case for OER is just as strong today as it was two decades ago, but making it has become more challenging. The textbook industry co-opted the affordability narrative to promote textbook billing programs, and AI has upended the environment around teaching, learning, and content production faster than anyone's messaging has kept up.

Open education is more relevant to the problems facing higher education than it has ever been, yet too often it isn’t in the rooms where decisions are being made. 

The open education field started a national conversation in 2024 about new approaches to advocacy, prompted by an open webinar series hosted by a group of organizations and followed by a national survey. The conclusion was that what the field needed most was coordination at the national level: structure that would allow it to convene, set shared priorities, and have a collective voice. The Open Education Association was founded to fill that gap.

As the need for national coordination intensifies with shifts in the funding and policy landscape, the field is now positioned to take the next step.

This fall, the Open Education Association invites the open education field to collaborate on a process to select national priorities and develop shared plans to advance them. 

The process will focus on identifying challenges facing higher education today where openness is part of the solution but is not yet a large enough part of the conversation. Examples could include how to train nurses faster by reducing cost as a barrier, how to break down silos in educational data, or how to improve AI literacy through open materials. By connecting our national priorities to those of leaders and policymakers, open education can have an even greater impact in the years ahead.

The process kicks off with a webinar on August 12 and will continue throughout the fall with a series of listening sessions and calls for input, coordinated with organizations and communities across the country. The process culminates at an in-person summit on November 10-12, where representatives drawn from across the open education field will finalize a set of priorities based on the input gathered this fall. After November, everyone will be invited to join working groups and make commitments regarding how their individual, institutional, or organizational work can contribute to the national priorities over the next three years.

More details on the process, how to participate, how to host a consultation, and how you can apply to serve as a representative at the summit (including opportunities for travel scholarships) will be laid out in the webinar.  

Register now for the webinar and tell us what problem you think open education is best positioned to solve.