Member Spotlight: Allison Buckley
An OER program specialist wants to ensure the next gen of first-gen students has what they need from day one.
Allison Buckley arrived at college from rural Georgia carrying an optimism that would last about one week. She believed tuition covered the full cost of education. Then came the bookstore. "I'll never forget the sticker shock," she says. She found she needed "a separate small fortune just to purchase textbooks." While some of her classmates cracked open crisp new editions, Allison haunted the library stacks, using outdated versions of the books to study for exams. "In those moments,” she says, “it was hard not to feel like I was playing the game from the parking lot rather than standing at home plate with my colleagues."
The parking lot stays with you. It sharpens your vision, teaches you to spot barriers dressed up as standard practice. Allison’s favorite quote is from Maya Angelou: "I can be changed by what has happened to me. But, I refuse to be reduced by it." That refusal fuels her work now. As an OER program specialist with the Southern Regional Education Board, she expands open education capacity locally and nationally; she is particularly proud of her work collaborating with the Midwestern Higher Education Compact to bring OER into dual enrollment programs. Getting access to high-quality OER texts right away is a big boost for the students’ engagement, confidence, and success, she says. Watching it become more feasible for low-income and first-generation students to participate in dual enrollment crystallized it for her: this isn’t just theory. The work is making a tangible difference.
What Allison loves most about the OER field is its collaborative heart, the way knowledge circulates freely as a default. “Even as a relative newcomer to the field, I’ve been met with nothing but open arms, resources, shared strategies, and genuine smiles from those who have led this work for decades,” she says. “It is refreshing to work alongside people who treat knowledge not as something to be guarded, but as a public good meant to be shared by everyone.”
In five years, she imagines sustainable funding and open education practices baked into strategic plans — especially for dual enrollment programs. But mostly, she imagines the learners: high school students testifying that open access "didn't just save them money, but opened doors they didn't know were there." In the meantime, she’ll keep chipping away at that parking lot: “Let’s make ‘playing from the home plate’ the standard for every student.”
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