Community Building at Its Best: Creating Equitable and Inclusive Learning Environments
Twenty years ago, when we first started exploring this new thing called OER, we wanted to know who would create it, how to determine if it were high quality, where it could be stored, and how others might find it. Over time, the field developed rules for how it could be shared or exchanged with others, including terms of use and technical infrastructure. It was a brave new world that began to challenge existing mechanisms within our education system, for example, course approval processes, procurement policies, tenure and promotion, and ownership of the means of production. Today we find ourselves with legislation supporting OER initiatives across the country, statewide efforts supporting its impact on equity and access, zero-cost textbook pathways and degrees, the development of field-based trainings and certificates, and a dynamic community of those who actively embrace issues of diversity and inclusion within the context of open pedagogy. The field of OER, having been built on the shoulders of the open source community—which at its core was a mechanism for the redistribution of power—is well poised to accelerate community building and knowledge sharing. This is a future where OER is no longer seen as a stand-alone silo or another add-on to a long list of education initiatives, but instead as an integrated process and approach to supporting equitable and inclusive learning environments that contribute to the creation of a more just society.
Dr. Lisa Petrides is CEO and founder of the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education (ISKME), a global nonprofit dedicated to making learning and knowledge-sharing participatory, equitable, and open. Petrides is a scholar and international open educational resources (OER) expert who has helped lead the development of tools and strategies to create and support the field of open educational practice. Her work includes the creation of ISKME's award winning OER Commons, a digital public library of open educational resources and collaboration platform that facilitates the discovery and improvement of high-quality digital resources that are free, openly licensed, and available for a diverse range of learners. She also serves as a member of UNESCO’s OER Dynamic Coalition Advisory Group, supporting the implementation of the UNESCO Recommendation on OER.
Lisa Petrides was elected to the San Mateo County Community College District Board of Trustees in November 2020, an independent, policy-making body charged by California Education Code with responsibility for establishing academic standards, approving courses of instruction and educational programs, and determining and controlling the operating and capital budgets of the District, a three-campus community college system in California serving more than 25,000 students at the College of San Mateo, Cañada College, and Skyline College.
Petrides is a former visiting scholar at Stanford University and professor in the Department of Organization and Leadership at Columbia University, Teachers College. She received a Ph.D. in Education from Stanford University and an MBA from Sonoma State University, and was a postdoctoral fellow in Educational Policy Research Division at Educational Testing Service. Petrides is widely published and consults with ministries of education, foundations, states, districts and schools around the world.