2026 Colorado OER Conference

This roundtable will consider how Open Educational Resources (OER) can support the development of flexible, skills-focused credentials that respond to evolving learner and institutional needs. As higher education continues to adapt to rapid labor market changes, OER offers a sustainable way to update learning materials, align programs with emerging fields, and remove cost barriers that often limit student participation and success.

Participants will explore how open resources can help institutions design more responsive curricula and expand equitable access to skills-based learning opportunities. Building on work by DOERS (Driving OER Sustainability for Student Success), this discussion aligns with Colorado’s goals to promote affordable learning and strengthen pathways from education to employment.

As artificial intelligence tools become more accessible in teaching and learning, they offer new possibilities for supporting—rather than supplanting—open education work. This roundtable discussion explores how AI can function as a practical timesaver in OER creation and maintenance, including revising learning outcomes, generating ancillary materials (such as quizzes, study guides, and practice activities), and supporting iterative improvement of open content. At the same time, participants will critically examine the limits and risks of AI use within open ecosystems, including issues of bias, transparency, labor, and trust.

Drawing on perspectives and advice from experienced OER practitioners—“OER long-timers” who have sustained this work across shifting technologies, funding cycles, and policy landscapes—this conversation will explore how AI can be integrated thoughtfully into community-centered OER practices while reinforcing collaboration, shared ownership, and care. Grounded in open education and open pedagogy scholarship (e.g., Wiley, 2014; Bali et al., 2020; Kasneci et al., 2023), this session invites participants to reflect on what it means to remain Open for Good—resilient, innovative, and collective—in an AI-mediated future.

Open education often gets framed as a technology problem. Where should OER live? In fact, as we as a CMC library team started planning for our recent grant, our first thoughts were about platforms, metadata standards, and software. We’re conditioned to think that way from years of cataloging and classifying information. If you find yourself asking, what platform should we build? Or, how can we brand and maintain a local repository? Go to a different session. Instead, this session is about somewhere else. Sustainable OER work depends more on people than it does platforms.

Institutions committed to Open Educational Resources (OER) and Zero Textbook Cost (ZTC) initiatives are increasingly navigating policy, funding, and system-level changes that complicate traditional models of openness. At Colorado Mountain College (CMC), the implementation of a mandatory book fee structure has reshaped how OER advocacy, faculty engagement, and student access are understood and practiced. Rather than stepping away from open education goals, CMC has focused on resilience - adapting strategies while maintaining a long-term commitment to affordability, equity, and care.

This 25-minute roundtable invites participants into a facilitated, interactive conversation about what it means to sustain OER and ZTC work when ideal conditions are not present. Facilitators will briefly share CMC’s context and lessons learned navigating OER within a mandatory fee environment, including evolving definitions of progress, transparency with students and faculty, and cross-campus collaboration among academic leadership and library services.

Participants will then engage in structured peer discussion to share challenges, strategies, and questions from their own institutions. Together, the group will explore how resilience can function as an active practice in open education - supporting sustainability, community trust, and advocacy even amid constraint.

Attendees will leave with shared language, practical insights, and peer-generated approaches for continuing OER work with integrity in complex or shifting institutional environments.

During this session, members of the ACC Disability Access Services (DAS) office will discuss and invite participants to ask questions and share experiences around OER and accessibility specifically relating to students with disabilities.  DAS colleagues will share the process from working with students, the faculty/instructors, publishers, OER coordinators, etc. to providing OERs in a media that meets the students’ needs based on their accommodations.  Additionally, participants will learn some of the different ways they can create, edit, manage, and research OERs in a way that is helpful to the DAS office and their students.  Combined with other members of the round table, a discussion of what is being done, what can be done, and how we can partner with other schools, authors, and editors, to ensure we are working together in a way that promotes engagement from our students and efficiency from our DAS offices.