Northeast OER Summit 2026

The Northeast OER Summit Committee invites you to share your ground-breaking ideas, research, and best practices in Open Education. This year’s theme is Building Bridges: Linking Local Foundations to Global Horizons. We aim to emphasize the connection between grounded community values and expansive global influence. UNESCO defines OER as “learning, teaching and research materials in any format and medium that reside in the public domain or are under copyright that have been released under an open license, that permit no-cost access, re-use, re-purpose, adaptation and redistribution by others.”

We invite proposals related to this year’s theme, Building Bridges: Linking Local Foundations to Global Horizons, on the following topics:

1. Collaborations Driving Open Education Initiatives: Highlighting the variety of roles and perspectives across campuses and institutions, statewide and regional initiatives, faculty learning initiatives.
2. Artificial Intelligence: Disruption to publishing practices; rethinking copyright, licensing, and intellectual property automated content production capabilities, accessibility and adaptive learning materials, leveraging AI for automated content creation, including quizzes, summaries, and learning modules, using AI to generate personalized learning paths and adaptive OER materials, using AI to create OER.
3. Automatic Textbook Billing and Homework Access Codes: Analyzing the impact of automatic textbook billing and homework access codes on student finances and retention, equity, access and ethics.
4. Data, Assessment, Evaluation, and Advocacy: Research in OER, evaluating student engagement, OER impact and programmatic assessment, future assessment projects, applying assessment results
5. Inclusion, Diversity, Equity and Accessibility (IDEA): Engaging student leaders, inclusion and diversity in open education, OER community building
6. The Future of Open: Sustainability, engaging student leaders, OER for resilience, OER community building, OER and emerging technology

Possible proposals can be one of the following session types:

• Presentation: A presentation on a topic relating to open education (20 minutes + 5 minutes Q&A)
• Panel Presentation: Two or more individuals addressing a topic from multiple perspectives. Inter-institutional panels are encouraged (35 minutes and 10 minutes Q&A).
• Workshop: An action-oriented hands-on workshop focusing on techniques and skills (90 minutes).
• Lightning Talk: A brief presentation on a topic relating to open education (5 minutes + 5 minutes Q&A).

All presenters will be expected to register and pay for this event. Please be available for the duration of the summit (March 25-26, 2026) for scheduling purposes.

Please note that we will not accept proposals that are advertisements for commercial products, but if you are a vendor interested in being a sponsor for the conference, please contact us.

To submit your proposal, visit the submission form.

For more information about submitting a proposal, please visit our website. To see sessions from past summits, please visit the Northeast OER Summit Collection at UMass ScholarWorks.

Our Timeline

• Proposals are due by Monday, January 5, 2026
• Notifications of acceptance by Sunday, January 25, 2026
• Full Program available by Friday, February 27, 2026

We are also seeking volunteers to review conference proposals. If you are interested, please contact Nicolas Simon.

Best regards,
The Northeast OER Summit Committee