Speaking
Ideas that move from values into practice
I speak about open education, learning, leadership, care, institutional change, and the structures that help people translate values into lived practice.
My work is grounded in teaching, open education, faculty development, learning design, libraries, and collaborative institutional change. I’m especially interested in the space between vision and implementation: the often-overlooked middle where people must make meaning, build trust, navigate complexity, and create the conditions that allow participation to become possible.
Across keynotes, conference sessions, panels, workshops, and facilitated conversations, I invite audiences to look beneath the visible work:
What supports people in moving from interest to action? What makes a learning environment genuinely enterable? What happens when institutions express commitments to openness, care, or collaboration without building the infrastructure those commitments require?
My sessions are thoughtful, practical, relational, and shaped for the people in the room.
Featured Speaking
From Vision to Practice: The Path to Open
Closing keynote · The Borderlands Open Access Symposium · 2026
In this closing keynote, I explored how educators and institutions can move from believing in open education to building the practical pathways that allow people to participate in it.
The session focused on the often-overlooked middle of open work: the point where people must search, evaluate, interpret licenses, address accessibility, make design decisions, find collaborators, and determine how a project will be sustained. I invited participants to think beyond isolated OER adoption and toward open education as a supported ecosystem of people, practices, relationships, and shared infrastructure.
Presented at the inaugural Borderlands Open Access Symposium hosted by Sul Ross State University Library and Archives.
Open Education Research & Planning Mini-Grant: An On-Ramp into Open Education
Presentation · OER Momentum Convening · University of Texas System · 2025
This presentation focused on the structures that help educators move from initial interest in open education toward meaningful implementation.
I shared examples from my work supporting OER discovery, course redesign, faculty development, grant preparation, documentation, and sustainable adoption. The presentation emphasized that open education programs need more than awareness-building. They also need clear pathways, visible processes, practical tools, and relational support that help people navigate complexity without becoming overwhelmed.
Students as Open Education Leaders: Building a Student-Driven OER Advocacy Model
Lightning talk · Open Education Conference · 2025
This lightning talk shared a model for positioning students as active leaders in open education rather than treating them only as recipients of lower-cost course materials.
Drawing from student OER advocacy work at The University of Texas at Arlington, I discussed how mentorship, meaningful roles, collaborative projects, and institutional support can help students participate in awareness-building and educational change.
The session emphasized the importance of creating structures through which students can develop their own voices, knowledge, and leadership within open education movements.
OER and Information Literacy Connections: Incorporating Students in OER Advocacy and Adoption Efforts
Panelist · ACRL Student Learning and Information Literacy Committee webinar · 2025
This national webinar explored the connections among open educational resources, information literacy, and student leadership.
Alongside presenters from The University of Texas at Arlington and McMaster University, I shared practical approaches for involving students in OER advocacy, mentorship, inclusive hiring, and authentic institutional collaboration. The panel highlighted ways students can contribute to open education through classroom projects, campus campaigns, peer outreach, and formal advocacy programs.
The session centered students as leaders and change agents whose knowledge and experiences should shape how institutions understand and implement open education.
Co-presenters: Lainie Taylor Allen, Katie Harding, Rebecca Bekele, and Kiana Lowes
Speaking Topics
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Open education is often framed through licenses, cost savings, access, and reuse. Those things matter, but they don’t fully explain what openness asks of us.
I explore openness as a relational practice shaped by participation, reciprocity, trust, care, consent, and shared responsibility. These sessions invite audiences to consider what becomes possible when open education is understood not only as access to resources, but as a way of learning, creating, and changing institutions together.
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Many educators and institutions already believe in access, care, inclusion, collaboration, and openness. The challenge is building the pathways that allow people to act on those values.
These sessions focus on the structures between intention and implementation: clear processes, relational support, usable tools, shared infrastructure, and the often-invisible labor required to move from aspiration to sustained practice.
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Students are often discussed as beneficiaries of educational change rather than participants in shaping it.
I speak about how institutions can create meaningful roles for students in advocacy, open education, course design, research, peer learning, and institutional change. This work emphasizes mentorship, shared authority, authentic participation, and the conditions that help students develop their own knowledge and leadership.
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Care is not only an interpersonal gesture. It is also expressed through the way learning environments, policies, resources, and expectations are designed.
These sessions examine how accessibility, representation, transparency, flexibility, and relational responsibility can be built into teaching, curriculum, professional learning, and institutional systems.
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Meaningful educational change rarely belongs to one person or department.
Drawing from work with faculty, students, librarians, instructional designers, administrators, and disciplinary partners, I explore the connective work required to build shared understanding, align different forms of expertise, and sustain change across organizational boundaries.
Formats
I’m available for:
Keynotes and plenary sessions
Conference presentations
Interactive workshops
Faculty and staff professional learning
Panels and moderated conversations
Leadership retreats
Guest lectures
Virtual presentations
Custom facilitated sessions
Sessions can be adapted for higher education, K–12 organizations, libraries, nonprofits, professional associations, and community learning spaces.
What I Bring to the Room
My speaking is informed by both scholarship and practice. I’m interested in ideas, but also in what happens when those ideas meet real people, real institutions, and real constraints.
Audiences can expect:
thoughtful language for experiences that may be difficult to name
practical connections between values and everyday decisions
attention to systems, relationships, and hidden forms of labor
questions that invite reflection without oversimplifying complexity
examples grounded in educational practice
space for participation, dialogue, and meaning-making
I don’t believe every session needs to end with a tidy answer. Sometimes the most useful outcome is a sharper question, a newly visible tension, or a shared language that makes different action possible.
About Megan
Megan Brittany-Fruia Zara is an educator, open practice strategist, learning designer, writer, and PhD student in Leadership and Change at Antioch University. She is the founder of The Open Practice Academy, where she develops learning experiences and supports educators, institutions, libraries, and community organizations working toward more open, relational, and humane forms of practice.
Her work draws from open education, care ethics, relational leadership, communities of practice, faculty development, curriculum design, and institutional change. Across her speaking, scholarship, and professional practice, she explores how people translate values into action and how organizations can create the conditions for trust, participation, learning, and meaningful change.
Invite Me to Speak
I welcome invitations from colleges and universities, K–12 organizations, libraries, nonprofits, professional associations, conferences, and values-aligned organizations.