Over the last three months, hundreds of open education community members have participated in more than a dozen listening sessions about choosing national priorities for open education. The conversations have focused around connecting open education as a solution to challenges facing leaders in postsecondary education, with each group generating rich input that will feed into the Open Education National Summit next month.
Below is a summary of some of the main themes that have emerged so far, illustrated by sample comments. These will be discussed further in the National Priorities Pre-Conference at the Open Education Conference next week.
Problem Themes: Challenges Facing Postsecondary Education
Budgets and enrollment: “Budget cuts, always.” “Enrollment. And by enrollment, they mean revenue.” “Public divestment by states and the feds.”
Trust and value: “Increasing hostility towards higher education; questions about value and purpose.” “Suspicion from state legislatures on the benefits of higher ed.”
AI: “AI is disrupting the way we teach and assess learning.” “Leaders are excited but faculty are the ones dealing with the true issues with implementation.” “Gen AI and cognitive offloading.”
Political pressure: “Attempts to cut whole departments and censor curriculums by political forces.” “External pressures on academic freedom.” “Federal overreach.”
Workforce: “Timeliness of curriculum to respond to workforce changes.” “The current over-focus on [workforce] at the cost of humanities, social sciences.”
Staffing: “Staffing cuts.” “Faculty burnout.” “Leadership turnover.”
Solution Themes: How Open Education Helps
Access: “Not charging students a fortune for materials that expire could help build trust.” “OER shows what is being taught and there is nothing to hide.” “Students can keep the materials vs turning them back in.”
Adaptability: “Agility, be able to add new information quickly.” “Tailoring course content to specific regional needs.”
Sovereignty: “Freedom over content not under state or publisher control.” “Give educators invested ownership of the curriculum.” “Fight textbook censorship.”
Meaningful learning: “Invite students into co-creation of knowledge[.]” “Open pedagogy and reusable assignments are implicitly ‘AI-proof.’”
Efficiency: “Releasing materials openly… allows us to avoid reinventing the wheel.” “Sharing curriculum out to help lower the time burden on faculty.”
“Inward-Facing” Themes: Challenges From the Field
Labor: “It lives across so many places and often with a single person.” “Depends on unpaid labor.”
Ease of use/ancillaries: “OER discoverability is a real issue.” “Faculty want OER equivalent of publishers’ easy course-in-a-box.”
Buy-in: “Loss of momentum/interest in OER. It’s not new anymore.” “Put OER in policy so that one administrator cannot ‘destroy’ OER.”
Competition: “We’re really struggling with Barnes and Noble First Day Complete.” “Inclusive Access programs… are taking the language of OER.”
Messaging: “We need to focus on the value of open education outside the cost saving argument.”
Silos: “...OER initiatives working in silos, institutions and faculty taking the same steps but always separately.”
End Goal Themes: What Does it Look Like for Open Education To “Win”
Students thrive: “Students are successful. They learn, complete the degree pathways they want, feel connected to each other and their instructors.” “When education is attainable.”
Knowledge is shared and co-created: “All students get to see themselves as a vital part of the knowledge creation process.” “When classrooms are no longer set up for students to be passive learners.”
Open is the default: “When your community thinks open is normal and gets surprised when they find out others don’t.” “Colleges build together instead of each one reinventing the same intro course materials.”
Education is a public good: “When capitalism is not prioritized over learning.” “We don’t need to worry about platforms sunsetting, being sold, and scrambling to make sure we can still access the materials.”
