Session Title:
Session Description:
Open Access and OER often win hearts quickly, then stall in the messy middle: where faculty are overworked, students are already behind, and the “how” of implementation is unclear. In this 20-minute opening keynote, Megan Zara offers a clear, human-centered frame for moving from Open Access vision to action, especially in rural and border-serving contexts.
Megan shares a simple model for change that prioritizes clarity (a visible path), care (capacity-aware design), and credibility (decision-ready documentation that survives turnover).
Attendees will leave with practical takeaways they can adapt immediately, including a low-overwhelm mini lesson sequence that individuals and teams can use as an on-ramp from interest to implementation.
Speaker(s):
Megan Zara is an Open Education librarian and program designer currently building the Open Education and OER program at the University of Texas at Arlington, which focuses on helping institutions move from “we support affordability” to practical, teachable infrastructure for Open Access and OER. Her work centers on documentation-as-pedagogy: making the invisible parts of Open work doable through repeatable workflows, simple templates, and capacity-aware support that reduces overwhelm without lowering rigor. Megan’s approach is grounded in care ethics, capacity building, and Universal Design for Learning, with a particular commitment to rural and border-serving regions where access is shaped as much by time, bandwidth, and support as it is by cost.
This initiative is made possible in part by Dr. Jennifer Miller-Ray’s participation in the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board’s (THECB) OER Fellowship Program, whose vision is “to support mentor relationships for OER use, creation, and capacity building at institutions and statewide.”
last updated: March 3, 2026