The Open 2030 Working Group, comprised of thought leaders and educational innovators and funders, focuses on building educational equity and social justice through Open Educational Resources (OER). While we celebrate 20 years of free access to knowledge through OER content production and OER use, educators still grapple with growing disinformation and social division as well as the lasting legacies of racism and systemic oppression. What communities and cultural practices around OER can we develop and strengthen in order to achieve justice and equity goals? How can we create deeper connections and collaboration between OER communities of practice and justice and equity movements?
[updated May 28, 2021]
Save the date! Likely agenda topics will include:
Generative AI and open
Climate and open
Funding the Commons
Automatic textbook billing
Open responses to assaults on higher education
Deb Adair, Executive Director, Quality Matters
Nicole Allen, Director of Open Education, SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition)
Robert Awkward, Assistant Commissioner for Academic Effectiveness, Massachusetts Department of Higher Education & Professor, Middlesex Community College
Norman Bier, Director of the Open Learning Initiative (OLI) & Executive Director, Simon Initiative, Carnegie Mellon University
MJ Bishop, Associate Vice Chancellor and Director, William E. Kirwan Center for Academic Innovation, University System of Maryland
Rachel Brooke, Interim Executive Director, Authors Alliance
Chris Bourg, Director of Libraries, MIT
Amy Brand, Director of The MIT Press, Founder of MIT Open Publishing Services, and Co-founder of the Knowledge Futures Group
Christopher Capozzola, Senior Associate Dean for Open Learning, MIT
Cathy Casserly, Advisor, strategist, leadership coach
Angela DeBarger, Education Program Officer, The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation
Kaitlin Donovan, Program Manager, Social Impact, Filecoin Foundation for the Distributed Web
Monique Earl-Lewis, Associate Professor of Africana Studies/ Director of the Faculty Development Teaching and Advisor Center, Morehouse College
Ryan Erickson-Kulas, Programs Director, Michelson 20MM Foundation
Maria Feith, Director, MERLOT-SkillsCommons
James Glapa-Grossklag, Dean, Educational Technology, Learning Resources, and Distance Learning at College of the Canyons (California, USA)
Mark Graham, Director of the Wayback Machine, Internet Archive
Cable Green, Director of Open Knowledge, Creative Commons
Gerry Hanley, Executive Director, MERLOT-SkillsCommons
Sarah Hansen, Senior Manager, Open Education & Strategic Initiatives, MIT Open Learning
D. Fox Harrell, Professor of Digital Media and Artificial Intelligence and Director, Center for Advanced Virtuality, MIT
Alexia Hudson-Ward, Associate Director for Research and Learning, MIT Libraries
Joe Karaganis, Director, Open Syllabus Project
Peter B. Kaufman, Senior Program Officer, Resource Development & Strategic Initiatives, MIT Open Learning (co-chair)
SJ Klein, Underlayer, Board Member, Knowledge Futures Group
Sharon Leu, Senior Policy Advisor, Higher Education Innovation, U.S. Department of Education
Nick Lindsay, Director for Journals and Open Access, MIT Press
Jami Mathewson, Director of Partnerships, Wiki Education
Mark McBride, Associate Director, Libraries, Scholarly Communication, and Museums, Ithaka S+R
Veronica McEachin, Associate Vice Chancellor of Academic Innovation, Southern University at Shreveport
Robbie Melton, Associate Vice President and Graduate Dean, Tennessee State University
Ryan Merkley, Managing Director, Aspen Digital
John Mohr, Chief Information Officer, MacArthur Foundation
Ross Mounce, Director of Open Access Programmes, Arcadia Fund
Cailyn Nagle, OER Program Manager, Michelson 20MM Foundation
Curt Newton, Director, MIT OpenCourseWare (co-chair)
Anthony Palmiotto, Editorial Director, OpenStax
Alison Pendergast, Senior Program Officer, The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
Lisa Petrides, CEO, Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education (ISKME)
Hal Plotkin, Consultant, College Promise Campaign
Krishna Rajagopal, Chair, MIT OpenCourseWare Faculty Advisory Committee
Nichole Saad, Senior Program Officer, Education, Wikimedia Foundation
Philipp Schmidt, VP Technology Innovation, Axim Collaborative
Richard Sebastian, Teaching and Learning Coach, Achieving the Dream
Shira Segal, Collaborations and Engagement Manager, MIT OpenCourseWare
Alex Stinson, Lead Strategist, Wikimedia Foundation
Peter Suber, Director, Office for Scholarly Communication, Harvard University
Loic Tallon, former Chief Digital Officer, Metropolitan Museum of Art
Jeff Ubois, Vice President, Lever for Change | MacArthur Foundation
Willem van Valkenburg, Executive Director, TU Delft Extension School and Past-President Open Education Global
Ben Vershbow, Director, Community Programs, Wikimedia Foundation
Clarissa West-White, Reference Librarian, Bethune-Cookman
John Willinsky, Khosla Family Professor, Graduate School of Education, Stanford University
Lisa Young, Faculty Administrator for Open Education and Innovation, Maricopa Community Colleges; Board of Directors, Open Education Global
Logistics contact: Yvonne Ng, Annual Giving and Donor Relations Officer, MIT Open Learning
Read the inspirational vision statements of our founding members, assembled at our first meeting on May 21, 2019.
The Fall/Winter meeting of the Open 2030 Working Group was held as a hybrid session on December 12, 2023, at Carnegie Mellon University’s Open Learning Initiative in Pittsburgh. The meeting began with tours for in-person participants of CMU’s Emerald Cloud Lab, Center for Transformational Play, Automated Science Lab, and Sustainability Initiative, and a special screening of a new climate-change documentary in CMU’s Tepper Hall.
Tuesday, December 12 – Working Group meeting
8:30 AM Breakfast and coffee
9:00 AM Meeting opens
The Open 2030 Working Group met as advances have accelerated in the field of machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) but as progress around equity in education still requires more catalytic efforts from this group and others, and as the dynamism required of world leaders around other existential issues like global warming remains underwhelming. Among the points of context for the Group were the recent release of MIT white papers on AI (https://news.mit.edu/2023/mit-group-releases-white-papers-governance-ai-1211); events on AI at CMU (https://www.cs.cmu.edu/generative-ai/events); sets of principles coming out about AI from Group members, including Creative Commons (https://creativecommons.org/2023/10/07/making-ai-work-for-creators-and-the-commons/); and new media productions appearing that highlighting the importance of action toward our sustainable development goals (https://youtu.be/fhNSKcL-YLs?si=Sremj-iPN4tr3OUX). The Open 2030 Working Group meeting at CMU in December dove deeply into five topics.
9:30 AM AI and Open Education - SPECIAL FOCUS: AI, Equity, and OER
Topic #1 was AI and Open Education with a special focus on AI, equity, and OER. CMU’s Carolyn Rose described the university’s Generative AI Innovation Incubator (https://www.cs.cmu.edu/generative-ai/), among other initiatives. Discussion points included the challenges posed by Gen AI for copyright and traditional forms of citation and attribution; the manifold challenges and opportunities of AI in teaching and learning; and also the countervailing interests of private corporations and educational and cultural communities keen to develop a new kind of public-interest AI. Tennessee State University’s Robbie Melton spoke to the work now necessary on the part of educators to insure that work with AI in and around the classroom does more than perpetuate longstanding biases around race and gender. MIT’s Sarah Hansen and Shira Segal presented MIT’s progress on working with community colleges including College of the Canyons and the Maricopa Community College District in our new Sloan-Foundation-funded initiative, which includes a Canvas course on OER and open pedagogy: https://canvas.instructure.com/enroll/M6J3CK. This initiative supports community college faculty in adopting and adapting OER from MIT OpenCourseWare into their teaching – with an emphasis on learning from the faculty how to make MIT OCW more useful to educators. Hansen and Segal and Monique Earl-Lewis of Morehouse College discussed the Culturally Relevant Pedagogy speaker series (Fall 2023) as an informal continuation of last year's Hewlett-Foundation-funded initiative with TSU, MERLOT, and MIT that focused on contributing to the HBCU Affordable Learning Solutions (AL$) Community Portal.
10:15 AM From Access to Equity
11:00 AM Exemplar Courseware
Topic #2 was CMU’s work with its equity-entered Exemplar Courseware project, supported by the Gates Foundation and others. Exemplar Courseware is heavily invested in making online education of use to learner populations of Black & LatinX first-generation students, and brings together experiments in learning science, immersive education, and learning engineering to reduce the size of equity gaps in gateway courses in higher ed. The licensing around Exemplar Courseware platforms and materials (as with MIT OpenCourseWare’s now) is under the microscope; and different knowledge creation practices (evident among tribal colleges, for example [https://localcontexts.org/]) are of great interest to the project. Among the papers referenced: An astonishing regularity in student learning rate” (PNAS 2023).
11:30 AM Diamond Open Access –> Diamond Open Education
Topic #3 was Diamond Open Access / Diamond Open Education, described as in need of a better name (“Community Owned and Operated” Open Access, for example) because of the extractive association with diamond mining. Creative Commons’s Cable Green made his slides available with the usual Cable-ish alacrity. The MIT Press’s Nick Lindsay described the Press’s work with Direct2Open (https://direct.mit.edu/books/pages/direct-to-open), supported in part by the Arcadia Fund.
12:00 PM CMU’s Year of Open Science
1:00 PM Replacing Automatic Textbook Billing
Topic #4 was the challenge of Automatic Textbook Billing. The Michelson Foundation’s Cailyn Nagle decried the methods of some commercial publishers using the language and key terms of the open movement to serve their private interests and the need for empowering students and faculty with the right to opt-out of predatory billing plans for educational material. Working Group members Joe Karaganis of Open Syllabus and Chris Capozzola from MIT described the general challenges remaining around OER textbook adoption and flipping the journals of scholarly publishing societies to more open models. Nagle made slides available and is assembling a new task force on the topic this year.
1:30 PM Open Climate initiatives - Community updates
Topic #5 was Open Climate initiatives and updates on climate action from the community (including news about CMU’s Year of Open Science). Melanie Gainey from CMU Libraries led a discussion about the Open Repositories conference (https://or2024.openrepositories.org/) and group member Richard Sebastian discussed how best to form new communities of practice in this area. Cable Green discussed three of the Open Climate projects that Creative Commons is leading / participating in (https://openclimatecampaign.org/; https://creativecommons.org/about/open-climate-data/; https://www.norad.no/en/front/funding/open-earth-platform-initiative-openepi/); the UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science: https://www.unesco.org/en/open-science/about; and new open education climate communities (http://bit.ly/oeglobal-climate-community). MIT’s Curt Newton presented on MIT’s work – a key focus of the Institute’s new president – and efforts to build a stronger community of practice at the intersection of climate and open knowledge (https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/116wez-iZJjxgTa3Oo9WuoRRDXLLeIY2DFTVCz6ewekg/edit?usp=sharing).
2:15 PM Breakouts & Breakthroughs: Next steps
In the closing discussion Working Group members and hosts and guests spent time expanding on the issue of open infrastructure more generally, the opportunities presented by large amounts of funds in donor-advised funds, and the challenges to open knowledge posed by current legal threats to the Internet Archive and others. Discussion returned to the issues around AI, with reminders of the accelerating velocity of change in AI-generated textbooks (including those built from MIT Open Courseware syllabi [https://owencolegrove.substack.com/p/ai-can-write-near-human-level-college?utm_source=profile&utm_medium=reader2] and responsible AI licenses (RAIL, at: https://www.licenses.ai/).
Forthcoming meetings of the Working Group will focus more on these issues and the opportunities ahead for building more open infrastructure. Ithaka S&R’s Mark McBride and others pointed to the leadership work of Invest in Open (https://investinopen.org/); we’ll be certain to invite them to forthcoming sessions.
3:30 PM Meeting ends
Hybrid meeting, at MIT Open Learning and on Zoom, 10:00am - 3:30pm ET
Agenda:
10:00 AM - Introductions and new members
10:30 AM - New collaborations and community updates - Part 1.
HBCU Affordable Learning Solutions OER program
Wikimedia - impact topics, especially climate change
Community College OER programs, and new collaboration with OCW
12:15 PM - Funder briefings
12:45 PM - New collaborations and community updates - Part 2.
Generative AI and open knowledge
Open textbooks updates: EnCOREage, LibreText
Community of practice for open knowledge and climate change
2:30 PM - What’s next? Takeaways from today, things we’ll work on before next meeting
Slides presented
Alex Stinson: How Wikimedia organizing for #ClimateAction can help us think about what the world needs from Open
Curt Newton: Open Climate Knowledge Community of Practice
Hybrid: at MIT Open Learning & on Zoom, 10:00 am – 3:30 pm ET
Agenda:
Introductions and new member welcome
New collaborations and community updates
HBCU-MERLOT-MIT share-out
Creative Commons + Arcadia: Open Climate Campaign
Reports from the field
Publishers’ update: OpenStax, MIT Press, PubPub
Open Syllabus: new progress
Lunch
New collaborations - generative space
Open & inclusive scholarship
Repository sharing of adapted materials
OER discovery through UN SDG framing
The agenda and notes from May 11, 2022 can be found here.
Agenda and notes from meetings in 2020 and 2019, when we were known as the Open 2020 Working Group, can be found on our Archive page.