Texas OER (Open Educational Resources) Fellowship

The Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board (THECB) OER Fellowship supports Texas educators and institutions as they expand the use of Open Educational Resources (OER). It’s a professional learning program focused on helping colleges and universities make course materials more affordable, more accessible, and more responsive to students’ real learning needs.

OER are teaching and learning materials that are free to access and openly licensed, which means faculty can legally reuse, revise, remix, and share them. That flexibility is a big deal. It allows instructors to build course resources that fit their students, their disciplines, and their local context, instead of forcing learning to fit whatever a commercial textbook happens to offer.

What the fellowship is trying to accomplish

The fellowship is designed to help participants move from interest to action by building knowledge, confidence, and sustainable processes for OER work. The goals are straightforward:

  1. Reduce the cost of learning

by supporting OER adoption and creation.

2. Increase access

by promoting materials that are free on day one and usable across devices and situations.

3. Improve teaching and learning

through resources that can be customized and updated.

4. Strengthen institutional capacity

by developing workflows, partnerships, and practices that last beyond any single project.

5. Center equity and accessibility

so the benefits of OER show up most for the students who have historically carried the highest burdens.

What impact can this have?

When OER work is done thoughtfully, the impact is both immediate and long-term.

For students, OER can mean:

  • No more delayed access because of cost

  • Fewer barriers to participation in the first weeks of class

  • Materials that reflect diverse perspectives and current realities

  • Better support for accessibility needs and different learning contexts

For faculty, OER can mean:

  • More control over course content

  • The ability to tailor examples, readings, and activities to students

  • A pathway into open pedagogy and more engaged teaching approaches

  • A community of practice that reduces isolation and shares the labor

For institutions, OER can mean:

  • Clearer, more sustainable processes for affordability and access

  • Stronger cross-campus collaboration

  • More consistent student success supports across sections and departments

  • A culture shift toward learning materials as something we build with and for learners

The headline is affordability, but the deeper story is capacity: building the ability for people to find, adapt, create, and share what they need to teach and learn well.

UPDATES

Thursday, February 12th, 2026

Where I am right now: iteration, not perfection

On February 11, 2026 (yesterday), I shared my learning so far at the 2026 Digital Learning Summit. If I’m being honest, the presentation felt a bit scattered. There’s a sting to that feeling, because part of me wants to deliver a clean, polished narrative with a bow on it.

But the truth is: I’m summarizing months of work (October 2023 to February 2026) that has led to where we are now, and the work itself is messy in the best way. It’s caring, shared, and innovative. It’s full of listening, testing, revising, and trying again. And that’s what inclusive, accessible, meaningful badge programs require.

One thing I intentionally named in that presentation is something I’m leaving behind: the idea that I have to have it all figured out before I start. That mindset isn’t useful. It can even be harmful, because it delays action and shuts down experimentation.

If anyone in the session felt overwhelmed, I genuinely understand why. When you’re trying to compress a long journey into a short window, the story can come out chaotic. But that chaos also reflects reality: sustainable OER work is not a straight line.

The advice I wish I had put at the center

If I could distill the most important lesson from this journey, it would be this:

Start with your people.

Listen. Ask questions. Learn the constraints and the hopes in your community. Then build the smallest first version that addresses a real pain point and launch it. Even a small start can feel daunting, but you do not need every detail planned to begin. You do need a clear vision of the purpose.

For me, the vision has always been capacity-building: helping people do, know, find, and become what they want and need in their teaching and learning. The path to that vision is iteration. The commitment is to keep listening and keep refining.

Explore my interactive presentation (embedded below)

Below, you’ll find an interactive version of my presentation from February 11, 2026. It includes links to templates and resources so you can follow the thinking behind the work, not just the final outputs.

A quick guide to using it:

  • The home page functions like my messy process space a digital bulletin board where ideas, drafts, and connections live in-progress.

  • The black circles with white i’s are navigation points. Click a circle to jump to the corresponding slide.

  • Prefer something simple? You can also click through like a regular presentation from start to finish.

I’m sharing it this way on purpose: building inclusive, accessible, meaningful OER systems is iterative. This format lets you see both the direction and the development.