Conferences and Events
Tuesday, February 17 - Thursday, February 19, 2026
Amy Hofer
Statewide Open Education Program Director
Open Oregon Educational Resources
Amy Hofer, Statewide Open Education Program Director with Open Oregon Educational Resources, has led Oregon's OER program for higher education since 2015. She will provide an overview of Oregon's statewide program and share lessons learned along the way that can be applied in Illinois and at your institution. Join your colleagues in considering what a welcoming community of practice for open education can look like.
Tuesday, February 17, 2026 from 10:00 AM to 11:00 AM
Amy Hofer
Amy Hofer, Statewide Open Education Program Director with Open Oregon Educational Resources, has led Oregon's OER program for higher education since 2015. She will provide an overview of Oregon's statewide program and share lessons learned along the way that can be applied in Illinois and at your institution. Join your colleagues in considering what a welcoming community of practice for open education can look like.
Tuesday, February 17, 2026 from 2:00 PM to 3:00 PM
Anne Humphrey
Chair of Innovative Course Materials
McHenry County College
Joseph Wachter
Professor, Chemistry & OER Coordinator
Harper College
Stephanie Whalen
Professor, English and Interdisciplinary Studies & Director, Academy for Teaching Excellence
Harper College
A panel of Illinois community college faculty and staff will discuss campus efforts to develop and implement OER materials for courses. Organizational structure, successes and challenges will be discussed.
Wednesday, February 18, 2026 from 10:00 AM to 11:00 AM
Michele Leigh
Open Illinois Senior Coordinator, Program Director Illinois SCOERs
CARLI
The Open Illinois Hub facilitates the use of Open Educational Resources (OER) and supports training, advocacy, and coordination of cooperative efforts for the benefit of members of the Consortium of Academic and Research Libraries in Illinois (CARLI), and other Illinois stakeholders. This centralized repository provides materials helpful to academic and research institutions in developing OER and advocating for adoption of OER on their campuses to reduce students' costs.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
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The Open Illinois Hub is a customized, branded resource on OER Commons where our network of users can create and share their locally created open educational resources and collections, have an institutional presence, or work collaboratively, and share news and events associated with a project or organization. OER Commons is a digital public library and collaborative platform launched in 2007 by ISKME (an independent, education nonprofit). It provides comprehensive infrastructure to identify high-quality OER and provides the space for collaboration during the creation or the adaption of open educational resources.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
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By combining resources from many CARLI member institutions into a seamless environment, faculty, staff, students, and the public are able to search across Illinois institutions and collections.
Wednesday, February 18, 2026 from 2:00 PM to 3:00 PM
Chris Dobson
Instructional Multimedia Developer
Harper College
Sarah Etlinger
Professor of English
Rock Valley College
David Dosier
Professor of Sociology
Rock Valley College
Lien Vu
Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Specialist, Adjunct Anthropology Instructor
Rock Valley College
This panel will begin with a practical discussion about the development and essential support needed to successfully integrate OER course content. In turn, panelists will share stories of their OER journeys toward open educational practices and how those practices promote learning within in-person and/or online contexts.
Thursday, February 19, 2026 from 10:00 AM to 11:00 AM
Matthew Lathrop
Professor of Mathematics
Heartland Community College
Saadia Khan
Professor, Chemistry
Triton College
(Session time still being determined.)<br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
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Dr. Saadia Khan, Chemistry faculty at Triton Community College, and Matt Lathrop, Math faculty at Heartland Community College, have authored OER texts and ancillaries with support from the IL SCOER and the IL Secretary of State/Illinois State Library grants. In this session, they will share their experiences developing and implementing these resources in their respective subject areas.
Thursday, February 19, 2026 from 2:00 PM to 3:00 PM
Mark Poepsel
Associate Professor, Mass Communications
SIU-Edwardsville
In this session, Mark Poepsel will discuss his individual and campus-wide OER efforts building to a partnership with SIU-Carbondale and the SIU Press which led to them hatching a grand plan to facilitate OER development across the state. In a nutshell, the idea is to take the institutional knowledge and practical experience of the SIU Press and make them available to be applied to OER projects for authors, remixers, and other course materials developers at all levels of education across the state. You can't spell REvOlution without OER.
