This article is part of Come Invent With Us: Perspectives On OEGlobal 2026, a series of viewpoints on OEGlobal 2026’s program tracks by the Open Education practitioners who make up the OEGlobal26 Host Organizations.
In this piece, Curt Newton, who has led OpenCourseWare at MIT Open Learning since 2004 — one of open education’s founding programs, and now celebrating its 25th anniversary — draws on the wisdom of natural ecosystems and the powers of collective imagination and energy to explore what it might truly mean for communities worldwide to co-create Open Education’s future.
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Consider what open education’s future could look like if communities worldwide co-create it — the power and responsibility of collective imagination.
When thinking about the future, I like to listen for messages from the past, because we of the current moment are future ancestors. When it comes to co-creation, with a few billions of years of experience, life on Earth has a lot to teach us.
What are some of those lessons? Flows of energy and material through interconnected webs of relationships sustain everything. Above ground, plants and pollinators have evolved a synchronous balance that co-creates abundance. In the life-giving soil, the mycelial connections that mycorrhizal fungi make with plant roots, passing nutrients and signals, are a co-creative web made physical. These ecosystems are entangled and dynamic, continuously responding to changes; species take root, mutate, expand, recede.
Learning more about these relationships deepens our collective responsibility to attend to and nurture them. This witnessing, giving due respect to cooperation and the richness of local contexts, represents a marked shift away from mindsets that center competition and scaling through extraction.
How might this relate to Open Education? Our resources and practices, our community, our movement, arose over the past few decades from the intersection of myriad social and technological forces – some long in the making like the drive to develop education as a public good, mixing it up with other newcomers like the Internet and cultures of digital sharing. Early pioneers of Open Education imagined and put forth new models into an uncertain world, removing barriers to knowledge access with openly-licensed materials. How audacious, to simply “give it away!”
As Open Education has spread and adapted worldwide, it’s a symptom of success that we face more changes and challenges. The social and political contexts for knowledge and education as public goods continue to shift. AI seems poised to upend jobs and expertise, our attachment to concepts of creative ownership and intellectual property rights, our relationship to knowledge and sensemaking. It’s all so uncertain!
The writer and activist Rebecca Solnit gives us the charge: “In the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act.”[1] While Open Education’s future is unpredictable, this is also the space that continues to invite our ideas, energies, and engagement.
When we share specific stories – perhaps developing a successful new niche for a program, or an unexpected result from a chance boundary-spanning remix – it can inspire others to think about their own contexts, realize the myriad ways that seemingly distinct situations are not so separate, and activate new co-creative relationships. Our future is not a dominating superhero vision, but a vibrant dynamic web of continuous experimentation, variation, and learning with each other.
The revered Zen master and teacher Thich Nhat Hanh counseled, “the next Buddha may be a Sangha.” (Sangha is a Sanskrit word that we can understand to mean a supportive community of practice.[2]) The insight and wisdom we need may be right here, within our community, waiting to be brought into being through our collective imaginations.
With what other people, ideas, institutions, or communities might you find a co-creative opportunity worth exploring? What are the deepest values that drive your open education work – and with whom outside of conventional education settings might those values resonate? Who else can you connect with about education affordability and equity, about our relationship to knowledge, expertise and trust in the time of AI, about the role and legitimacy of institutions, about the deepest questions of what makes for thriving communities and satisfying lives? When we see Open Education not as an end in itself, but instead as one of many routes to bigger shared-value ends, so much more becomes possible.
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Curt Newton joined MIT OpenCourseWare at MIT Open Learning in 2004, shortly after its launch, and now leads the program that supports millions of global learners and educators every year with open educational materials from across the MIT curriculum. He also works to build more effective and equitable climate action through open knowledge practices and resources at MIT and around the world, through a range of professional and civic engagements.
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OEGlobal 2026 — Come Invent With Us! takes place October 7–9, 2026, at MIT’s Samberg Conference Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in a hybrid format open to participants worldwide. The conference is co-hosted by Open Education Global (OEGlobal), MIT Open Learning, and the Massachusetts Open & Low-Cost Educational Resources Advisory Council (OLERAC), and marks the 25th anniversary of MIT OpenCourseWare. Learn more and register at conference.oeglobal.org.
[1] REBECCA SOLNIT; Grounds For Hope. Tikkun 1 January 2017; 32 (1): 30–39. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/08879982-3769066
[2] THICH NHAT HANH; The Next Buddha May Be a Sangha, Spring 1994 issue of Inquiring Mind (Vol. 10, No. 2), retrieved 06.07.2026