Overview and reflections on the UKSG OER Seminar 2026
After presenting Strategic support for OER at The University of Edinburgh at the UKSG OER Seminar in 2025, I was keen to attend the 2026 seminar this year purely as an attendee to learn more about what other institutions are currently focusing on in the world of Open Education Resources (OER). I’d noticed in the 2025 seminar that a lot of attention was focused on Open Textbooks, as UKSG members include scholarly and academic publishers and libraries this makes sense. This year while there was still a strong focus on scholarly texts, there was an increase in attention to other types of open licensed learning and teaching output.
The first speaker was Ying Liu, University of Southampton, presenting ‘From Remix to Reimagine: Adapting OERs for Interactive and AI-Enhanced learning’. Ying Liu had moved from California to Southampton and brought with her the US approach of creating open textbooks to reduce student costs. Instead of creating the text and then adding quizzes to test learning, they changed up the model.
In collaboration with the University of Dundee, they developed specific interactive case studies using H5P, an open-source content collaboration framework based on JavaScript that creates quizzes, videos, games interactive elements. This content was tested for accessibility and student feedback, and only then was the content adapted into an Introduction to Microbiology open textbook with embedded interactive elements.
I thought this was an excellent approach, especially bringing in student partners to review and assist with the interactive elements. We’re big on student collaboration ourselves and find it an excellent way to improve the learning relevance and value of resources.
University of Southampton are now developing an immunology resource, and as with many others right now, are trialling the use of Gen AI to assist with generation of diagrams, activities, and drafting resources. What they’ve found so far is that every single image, diagram, activity, generated by AI takes dedicated work and careful prompt engineering to generate the desired output, and this then very much needs to be quality control reviewed by a subject specialist, and that AI won’t replace educators because the pedagogical decisions need to be made by educators and student partners.
There was a question asked if they found any complications with attributing licences to the materials they created using Gen AI, and the answer was that information on which Gen AI model created the output was included in the attribution stated. This aligns with current governance that there can be no copyright of Gen AI content. I would have liked to ask Ying Liu’s thoughts on Gen AI assisted content, but there wasn’t time for follow up questions as we needed to move on to the next speaker. View Ying Liu’s presentation slides on the link below.
Next up we heard from Ross Parker and Adel Gordon presenting ‘From Policy to Platform: How Durham University built its Open Educational Resources Framework’. During lock down Durham University had started creating CC licensed materials, and since 2023 had an institutional principle encouraging their teachers to curate, share, and embed OER in their modules. Ross, Adel, and colleagues thought this should be underpinned by their own OER policy and gained approval in 2024 for development. They began by aligning their policy to existing initiatives and strategies at Durham, then reached out to peers in HE with established policies. As one of the folks they spoke with I was interested to see what direction they went with their policy development.
One of those directions was a focus on enhanced institutional reputation, metrics opportunities, and sustainability. OER can have a direct link to league table metrics as they provide public evidence of sustainability in re-use of materials, time management, and resource. Here Ross mentioned Melissa Highton, our Director of Learning Teaching and Web Services as being very well known and regarded in this space, and the importance of open licenses in both sustainability and preventing copyright debt, a term coined by Melissa.
They also chose to go down a similar route to our own Open.ed website, building their own website in WordPress to provide the policy, guidance, and a showcase of existing OERs which were being shared online in the places folk go to find those resources. The team made use of REF to search and locate existing University of Durham OER to be added to their showcase, seeking out open research, and developing and sharing case studies and impact studies. They’ve also created a template for staff to add their own resources to the showcase, with a moderation process before they go live.
You can read their policy and explore their OER showcase by clicking through to their webpage below.
Charlie Worthington, Collections Liaison Librarian at Kings College London, shared her project ‘Co-creating OER Services with students to contribute to a more open and inclusive curriculum at Kings College London’. Her project was supported by the King’s 100, an engagement programme where students are paid for their time and participation to work as co-creators on initiatives and projects that impact student experience.
Student were given 30-minutes of pre-learning and then attended a 2-hour facilitated workshop on the topic of OERs; how and why OER relates to their own learning and what they would want to see done to improve the awareness and use of OER at Kings. Workshops were the biggest category of discussion, very specifically about training and support, how to find, use, delivered by staff, librarians, students and more.
We run a wide variety of OER workshops at the University of Edinburgh, but these are mostly for our staff. It’s interesting to see here that the Kings students wanted workshops created for and run by students.
They then employed 8 students to work for ten hours and focused on a review of their OER LibGuide. Student initial feedback on the LibGuide described it as “dry as a bone” and an “unengaging word fest”. Ouch. After student collaboration the LibGuide received a complete overhaul, updating the language to remove unnecessary jargon and be more student focused, and giving the visuals a refresh.
When asked for her top learning point from the project, Charlie found that in her experience librarians often focus on textbooks, driven by either equity or financial considerations, but students were really interested in the bite size resources, slides, flashcards, and assessment prep, more than the texts and what was on the reading lists. She was also surprised by their interest in interdisciplinarity and collaboration across departments, faculties, and institutions as well.
Stephanie Buck, from Oregon State University’s Open Educational Resources Unit, shared the grant funding scheme they provide their academics to provide time, space, and resource for their academics to create, review, and update open textbooks. They have two grant schemes.
An Affordable Learning Grant with multiple funding levels, ranging from $3000 to $15,000 USD, to either “review, adopt, adapt, or author an open textbook or ancillary materials”. The other is an OER Review grant of $500 USD to review existing OER for potential use in a course.
More information on the grants can be found on the links below:
Oregon State University Affordable Learning Grant
Oregon State University OER Review Grant
Jane Saunders and Maria Andrades de los Rios, University of Leeds, shared the process the went through to create an Open Education Resources Team (very much focused on open textbook creation) within their Access and Acquisitions section. They have worked with Sylla to identify existing open textbooks to be used in their courses and then identified and began creating their own open textbooks and publishing on Pressbooks. They have 6 books published with a further 31 in development.
Suzanne Tatham, University of Southampton, and Toby Steiner from Thoth a non-profit open infrastructure for books, have been part of a collaborative initiative led by the LIBER Educational Resources Working Group to create a European Open Textbook Catalogue. They noted that many high-quality open textbooks remain difficult for educators, students and libraries to discover and access. They have initiated the project and are aiming to build a “trusted and interoperable infrastructure for European open educational publishing” using Thoth. And in doing so “create a multilingual catalogue of European open textbooks that supports discovery, dissemination, and long-term sustainability.
More information on the LIBER projects and activities, and on Thoth platform can be found below.
Measuring the impact of OER – Update from the LIBER Educational Resources Working Group
