By: Charlene Martoni and Jason Puckett

Georgia State University (GSU) Library is once again hosting the Open for Student Success Symposium, an online conference where educators and students share knowledge, practices, and research centered around open education. The 2025 event, to take place March 7, will feature two keynote speakers. Virginia Clinton-Lisell, Associate Professor of Education, Health, and Behavior at the University of North Dakota, will discuss her recent research investigating student perceptions of access codes and their impact on student success. Paola Corti, Open Education Community Manager at SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) Europe, will also share how her work seeks to break barriers in the Open Education Movement and harness the power of an international community of librarians.

Last academic year, the symposium’s coordination team decided to transform their approach by fully opening it to anyone curious about open educational resources and their applications for higher education. Presenters represented Chattahoochee Technical College, Clayton State University, Columbus State University, Georgia Southwestern State University, Georgia State University, Jefferson Community College, Kennesaw State University, Middle Tennessee State University, University of Georgia, University of Utah, and Valdosta State University. Additionally, the symposium coordinators obtained permission from speakers to publish recordings of the 18 presentations to an openly accessible library research guide under a Creative Commons license. The event received high levels of attendance, with over 100 registrants and 80 unique attendees. 

Notably, GSU professor, Hosanna Fletcher, and her students have participated in the symposium since its founding. Fletcher teaches a sociology course where she guides her students in the investigation of a social problem. Each year, her students have elected to investigate educational affordability, focusing on open education as a strategy to address the issue. Fletcher and her students will be participating in the symposium again in 2025, demonstrating how the event engages educators and students in open pedagogy and transformative learning. 

The symposium will expand further next year with the selection of a theme of “Open Education: Fueling Equity in Learning.” The team has also put out a special call for GSU students to share their voices, seeking to highlight student-centered projects that culminate in strategies to address issues in open education. The symposium team has also developed a proposal rubric, adapted from the Georgia Library Association Conference evaluation rubric, and they intend to publish the 2025 symposium’s openly accessible recordings with accompanying open educational resources submitted by presenters. 

The call for proposals for the 2025 Open for Student Success Symposium is now open! Proposals by any educator or student are welcome and are due by October 25, 2024. Session formats include 45 and 20-minute live sessions, as well as pre-recorded presentations. Questions can be sent to Charlene Martoni at [email protected]. 

About the symposium coordinators:

Though a world-wide event, the Open for Student Success Symposium started as a collaboration between two librarians, Mary Ann Cullen and Charlene Martoni, who were selected to represent Georgia State University (GSU) in the 2022-2023 OpenStax Institutional Partnership. The duo was later joined by their colleagues, librarians Jason Puckett, Denise George, and Stephanie Burnham, and this year, the team added librarians Christina Gangwisch and Brooke Fry to expand programming capacity on the university’s six campuses, and beyond.  

To learn more about Georgia State University's Library, go to https://library.gsu.edu/.