Open Education Season 2026: A Capstone Update
Fall 2025: A Semester of Building and Learning
This fall semester has been one of prototyping, piloting, and learning from both successes and stumbles. As I approach the end of my first full calendar year as the OER Librarian at the University of Texas at Arlington, I'm reflecting on how the work I've done in the past few months is setting the foundation for what comes next: Open Education Season 2026, a six-month research-in-practice initiative that will serve as my capstone for the THECB OER Fellowship.
The Badge Program Pilot
In August, I soft-launched the Open Education Trailblazers Badge Program—a self-paced Canvas course designed to create multiple entry points for students, faculty, staff, and community members to engage with Open Education. I advertised it through newsletters and reached out to colleagues across campus who had provided feedback on the program design earlier in the summer.
To kick things off, I ran a Launch Week with a webinar each day covering different aspects of the program. I'll be honest: attendance was not what I'd hoped. But I have the recordings, I learned what resonated and what didn't, and I gained clarity about what the program needs to succeed. Sometimes the most valuable learning comes from the things that don't go as planned.
The badge program remains its own initiative—open enrollment, self-paced, available to anyone. But through the pilot, I learned that most people need more scaffolding and community support than a self-paced course alone can provide. That insight shaped everything that came next.
The Mini-Grant Pilot
This fall, I also piloted the Open Education Research & Planning Mini-Grant—a program designed to invite faculty into Open Education not by asking them to immediately adopt or create resources, but by supporting them to explore and evaluate OER in their disciplines.
The structure: faculty attend three working sessions throughout the semester where I guide them through the research process, we talk about pedagogy and evaluation, and they work on their own exploration with built-in support. At the end, they write a landscape brief sharing what they found, what surprised them, and what their next steps are—whether that's adoption, adaptation, or a thoughtful explanation of why OER doesn't work for their context yet.
I ran the pilot with 10 participants across multiple disciplines. Some were already OER enthusiasts. Others were openly skeptical. That mix was exactly what I wanted, because skeptics who are willing to explore become the most credible advocates. When someone with legitimate concerns investigates and then shares their findings, that narrative carries more weight than any amount of librarian cheerleading.
The pilot cohort is currently writing their landscape briefs, which will be reviewed and published in early 2026. The experience of running those sessions—the questions they asked, the barriers they named, the moments when something clicked—taught me more about program design than any amount of planning in isolation could have.
Learning from Community
This fall also brought two significant professional development experiences that shaped my thinking.
In October, I attended the THECB OER Fellowship gathering in Austin, where I met with my fellow fellows (yes, that's the term we use). Hearing about their work at other Texas institutions—the challenges they're facing, the creative solutions they're trying, the ways they're adapting to different institutional cultures—reminded me that this work is deeply contextual. What works at a community college looks different from what works at a research university. What resonates at one HSI might not translate directly to another. There's no one-size-fits-all approach to building Open Education communities.
In November, I traveled to Denver for OpenEd25, the annual Open Education conference. I presented on invitation-centered design and care ethics in Open Education programming, and I made connections with people doing similar work at institutions across the country. Those conversations—over coffee, in hallways, during sessions—gave me language for things I'd been feeling but hadn't been able to articulate yet. The open education community is generous with both critique and encouragement, and I left Denver feeling more connected to the broader movement.
Also this fall, I applied for and was accepted into the OER Luminary Fellowship. I'm excited to bring what I learn through that fellowship back to Season 2026 and to continue building connections with practitioners doing innovative work in open education across institutions and contexts.
Presenting the Work: A Milestone
This week, I presented Open Education Season 2026 to my team—the librarians, director, and graduate research assistants who can help bring this initiative to life. The presentation ran just over an hour, and the questions my colleagues asked were sharp, honest, and exactly what I needed to hear.
They asked about discipline-specific barriers to OER adoption, about how we can improve course marking systems so students can actually find affordable courses, about team capacity and sustainability. This is what good collaboration looks like: people who care enough to challenge your assumptions.
The presentation was a milestone because it marked the transition from me piloting ideas to us building infrastructure together. And that collaborative shift is essential, because this work cannot be sustainable if it depends on one person doing everything.
What Is This Capstone, Really?
My THECB fellowship capstone has evolved significantly since I started at UTA in October 2023. Initially, I thought my capstone would be a single discrete project—maybe the mini-grant program, maybe the badge system. What I've come to understand is that the capstone is the whole integrated system, and my task is to document whether care-based, invitation-centered design can shift institutional culture around Open Education.
The capstone has three interconnected deliverables:
1. The Canvas Course: Open Education Trailblazers Badge Program
An 18-badge, self-paced course organized across six pathways (Foundation, Bridge, Practice, Creation, Engagement, Advocacy) that creates multiple entry points for engagement at whatever level fits people's capacity and interests. The fall pilot taught me what this program needs to succeed, and I'm redesigning it based on that learning.
2. The Pressbooks Book: "Open, On Purpose"
An openly licensed companion book that translates the research and theory into accessible language, using personal narrative to explore how Open Education connects to social justice, care ethics, and educational equity. This book is for practitioners—people doing the day-to-day work of building open education programs who need both inspiration and practical guidance.
3. The Academic Paper: "Widening the Circle"
A practitioner case study examining how narrative, community, and invitation can expand who participates in Open Education, grounded in critical pedagogy (Freire, hooks), communities of practice (Wenger), and care ethics (Noddings, Tronto). This paper will document the Season 2026 initiative and contribute to scholarship on open education program design.
But here's what matters more than the deliverables: this is practitioner autoethnography. My lived experience as a first-generation college graduate who struggled with textbook costs isn't bias to control—it's a lens that reveals patterns external researchers might miss. My positionality as a newly diagnosed autistic person who excels at asynchronous, digital-first communication shapes how I design for accessibility and multiple pathways. This isn't weakness; it's methodological strength.
The Theoretical Foundation: Why This Design?
The design of Season 2026 isn't arbitrary—it's grounded in three interconnected theoretical frameworks that have shaped my thinking about how communities form, how learning happens, and what care looks like in practice.
Critical Pedagogy: Education as Liberation
Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970/2000) argues that education can either domesticate or liberate, and that authentic education involves people as co-creators of knowledge rather than passive recipients. This insight fundamentally shapes how I approach Open Education: not as a top-down mandate to "use free textbooks," but as an invitation to examine whose knowledge is valued, who benefits from current systems, and how we might create more just alternatives.
bell hooks extends Freire's work by centering care, vulnerability, and the body in pedagogy. In Teaching to Transgress (1994), she writes about education as the practice of freedom and classrooms as sites where students and teachers can be fully present and fully human. Her work reminds me that Open Education programs cannot ask for vulnerability from faculty and students without modeling it ourselves—which is why transparency about capacity, constraints, and the messy process of learning is built into everything I'm designing.
Communities of Practice: Learning as Belonging
Etienne Wenger's Communities of Practice (1998) framework argues that learning is fundamentally social and happens through participation in shared practices. Communities of practice have three characteristics: mutual engagement, joint enterprise, and shared repertoire. You can't mandate these—they emerge through genuine collaboration.
This is why Season 2026 is designed around multiple entry points and ongoing engagement rather than one-time workshops. The mini-grant cohorts create learning communities where faculty explore OER together. The badge program creates pathways for different kinds of participation. The student ambassador program invites students to be knowledge-producers, not just beneficiaries. All of these are attempts to create the conditions for community rather than simply providing resources and hoping adoption happens.
Care Ethics: Making Care Visible and Collective
Joan Tronto's Caring Democracy (2013) defines care as "everything we do to maintain, continue, and repair our world so that we can live in it as well as possible." She argues that care involves attentiveness (noticing need), responsibility (taking it on), competence (doing it well), and responsiveness (attending to the response). Nel Noddings' Caring (1984) emphasizes the relational nature of care and the importance of the cared-for's perspective in defining what counts as caring.
These frameworks challenge me to ask: What does it mean to care for the Open Education community at my institution? It means noticing who's missing and why. It means creating structures that honor people's capacity. It means building in feedback loops and being willing to change course. It means acknowledging that textbook costs aren't just an inconvenience—they're a justice issue that demands collective response.
Care ethics also surfaces the tension I'm constantly navigating: institutional structures often treat care work as invisible, voluntary, and feminine-coded labor that happens outside "real" professional work. Making care central to program design is both practical and political.
Methodology: Practitioner Autoethnography
Methodologically, this project draws on practitioner autoethnography (Chang, 2008; Custer, 2014)—a research approach that positions the practitioner's lived experience and systematic reflection as legitimate sources of knowledge. Rather than trying to eliminate my positionality, I'm using it as an analytic lens.
This approach is particularly appropriate for Open Education research because our field values transparency, reflexivity, and the democratization of knowledge production. If we believe students' lived experiences count as knowledge, then practitioners' experiences building programs should count too. The goal isn't to produce generalizable findings but to offer thick description, documented decision-making, and transparent reflection that others can learn from and adapt to their own contexts.
How These Frameworks Connect
These three frameworks—critical pedagogy, communities of practice, and care ethics—aren't separate. They reinforce each other:
Critical pedagogy asks: Who gets to participate, and how do we create conditions for liberation?
Communities of practice shows: Learning happens through belonging and mutual engagement.
Care ethics demands: We must attend to relationships, capacity, and systemic barriers.
Together, they suggest that Open Education programs should be invitation-centered (creating multiple pathways for participation), community-focused (building relationships and shared practices), and care-based (attending to capacity and honoring people's full humanity).
This is the foundation Season 2026 is built on.
Season 2026: The Research in Action
Open Education Season 2026 (January–June 2026) is both strategic program expansion and live research. It's the phase where I test whether the theoretical frameworks I've been studying actually work in practice.
Everything I learned from the fall pilots is feeding into this design:
The badge program needs community scaffolding → monthly info sessions and a buddy system
Faculty need structured support, not just resources → expanded mini-grant program with three cohorts
Students need to be active participants, not just beneficiaries → Thank-A-Prof campaign, student ambassador program, engagement raffles
Marking and verification systems matter for equity → MyMav marking campaign to make no-cost courses visible
Infrastructure outlasts individual programs → landscape briefs, leadership presentations, portable credentials through badges
Three SMART Goals
Goal 1: Direct Student Impact
Support 12 new faculty adopters/creators across 6 departments
Impact 600+ students through new OER adoptions
Increase course marking accuracy by 20%
Increase course verification by 15%
Goal 2: Community Engagement & Narrative Change
Engage 250+ participants (at least 25% students)
Document 15+ narrative shift moments showing how understanding of Open Education evolves
Goal 3: Institutional Infrastructure & Recognition
Publish 8 landscape briefs (faculty reflections on OER in their disciplines)
Enroll 20 participants in Trailblazers badge program
Deliver 2 presentations to university leadership
The Systems Design
These goals aren't separate initiatives. They're designed as a reinforcing cycle:
Adoption → Community: Faculty who adopt OER through mini-grants share stories, attend events, become community members
Community → Infrastructure: Community engagement generates landscape briefs, provides evidence for leadership presentations, builds the Trailblazers program
Infrastructure → Adoption: Infrastructure supports future adopters, reduces barriers, creates pathways from awareness to action
This systems thinking reflects what Etienne Wenger calls "communities of practice"—not just individual learning, but collective knowledge-building through shared participation.
The Narrative Shift Framework: Measuring Cultural Change
One of the most innovative aspects of Season 2026—and the piece I'm most excited about for the academic paper—is the Narrative Shift Framework. While most OER programs measure adoption numbers and cost savings, I'm attempting to measure how people's understanding of Open Education changes.
I've identified seven types of narrative shifts:
Awareness → Understanding (from "I've heard of OER" to "I understand how it works and why it matters")
Skepticism → Openness (from "OER is probably low quality" to "I'm willing to explore")
Individual Problem → Systemic Issue (from "some students struggle with costs" to "textbook pricing is structural")
Cost Savings → Justice & Access (from "save money" to "remove barriers and redistribute resources")
Passive Consumer → Active Participant (from "I use what's provided" to "I can adopt, create, share")
Isolated Individual → Community Member (from "I'm on my own" to "I'm part of a movement")
Compliance → Pedagogy (from "I should use OER" to "OER enables better teaching and learning")
I'm building documentation practices into every event, every campaign, every interaction so I can track these shifts as they happen—through landscape briefs, through post-event surveys, through story collection forms, through recorded conversations.
This is messy, qualitative, iterative research. But it's the kind of research that matters for practitioners who need to know: How do we actually change institutional culture?
What I'm Learning About Leadership Through Care
Joan Tronto defines care as having four elements: attentiveness, responsibility, competence, and responsiveness. Season 2026 is designed to enact all four:
Attentiveness: The year I spent (October 2023–Fall 2024) observing, listening, and building relationships before launching major new initiatives. The working sessions where faculty can co-work with support rather than being told what to do. The multiple entry points that honor different capacities.
Responsibility: Clear role definitions with time estimates. A three-tiered team structure (Core Team, Event Roles, Volunteers) that lets people choose their level of commitment. Explicit acknowledgment that I'm prone to burnout and need help asking for help—and program design that addresses that.
Competence: Templates, checklists, and documentation that reduce cognitive load. Structured support for the mini-grant program rather than sending faculty off to "figure out OER." The Trailblazers program's alignment with professional frameworks (ACRL, NACE, tenure language).
Responsiveness: Documented pivot points where I changed direction based on feedback. Flexibility built into every timeline. Invitation to colleagues to tell me what feels challenging, not just exciting.
But here's what I'm still figuring out: How do you ask for care while providing care? Institutional structures don't easily accommodate mutual care—they expect leaders to be invulnerable and work to be extractive. Building sustainable programs means building systems where everyone's capacity and constraints are honored.
This tension is part of the research question.
Next Steps: January–June 2026
Between now and June 30, I will:
Finalize all infrastructure: Forms, LibGuide, Canvas course shell, communication templates
Launch Trailblazers on January 15: With the first monthly info session
Run three mini-grant cohorts: Expanding from the 10-person pilot to serve 6–8 faculty per cohort across the semester
Implement all campaigns: Weekly Teams messages, monthly newsletters, MyMav marking and search campaigns, Thank-A-Prof, referral system, story collection
Document everything: Narrative shifts, event attendance, survey responses, landscape briefs, personal reflections
Complete the three deliverables: Canvas course published via Canvas Commons, Pressbooks book published openly, academic paper submitted for publication
What This Means for the Field
If this works—if care-based, invitation-centered design can shift institutional culture around Open Education—it provides a replicable model for other institutions, especially Hispanic-Serving Institutions and institutions serving first-generation students.
The Canvas course will be openly licensed and shared via Canvas Commons. The Pressbooks book will be freely accessible. The academic paper will be published in an open-access journal. And all the templates, workflows, and decision-point documentation will be available for others to adapt.
This is what it means to practice openness: not just using open resources, but openly sharing the infrastructure of change-making itself.
An Invitation
I'm sharing this work-in-progress update for several reasons:
First, because transparency is a value in open education, and that means documenting the messy middle, not just the polished outcomes.
Second, because I need your feedback. If you're doing similar work at your institution, what resonates? What feels unrealistic? What am I missing?
Third, because this work is bigger than any one institution. The questions I'm asking—How do we center care in our programs? How do we measure narrative change? How do we build sustainable infrastructure?—are questions many of us are grappling with. Let's learn together.
Thank you to the THECB for supporting this work, to my UTA colleagues for their trust and collaboration, and to everyone in the open education movement who keeps asking: Who gets to learn, and who decides what learning looks like?
Megan Zara
Open Education Librarian, University of Texas at Arlington
Open Education Network Certificate of Open Librarianship (2024)
THECB OER Fellow (2024–2025)
Rebus Community Fellow (2026)
References
Chang, H. (2008). Autoethnography as method. Routledge.
Custer, D. (2014). Autoethnography as a transformative research method. The Qualitative Report, 19(37), 1-13. https://doi.org/10.46743/2160-3715/2014.1011
Freire, P. (2000). Pedagogy of the oppressed (30th anniversary ed.). Bloomsbury. (Original work published 1970)
hooks, b. (1994). Teaching to transgress: Education as the practice of freedom. Routledge.
Noddings, N. (1984). Caring: A feminine approach to ethics and moral education. University of California Press.
Tronto, J. C. (2013). Caring democracy: Markets, equality, and justice. New York University Press.
Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of practice: Learning, meaning, and identity. Cambridge University Press.