Katya Mueller has been selected as SPARC’s new Visiting Program Officer for Open Education. The appointment begins in November 2026 and runs through July 2027.
Katya will spend about a quarter of her time as VPO with SPARC, while maintaining her position at North Carolina State University Libraries. She has been a Libraries Fellow at NC State in Raleigh since July 2024.
Her curiosity in the field goes back to graduate school when she was introduced to open access publishing. “Thinking about democratization of knowledge and how access should not be hidden behind a paywall was my gateway to open education,” Katya said. “Beyond free textbooks, I was interested in open pedagogy and positioning students to be active producers of knowledge.”
Katya has been part of NC State’s robust OER program, the Alt-Textbook Project, which provides grants to faculty to create, adapt or remix open content. She has conducted OER training on her campus, across the UNC system and statewide for educators at public libraries, community colleges, and private universities. Katya helped create the EdTech Open Values program and a framework to evaluate edtech tools grounded in open values.
“We’ve focused on applying an open lens to how you are interacting with technology in the classroom – making sure you’re centering it on the students,” Katya said.
In her role as VPO, Katya will work with the SPARC team to advance openness in education. She will engage with SPARC members, connecting members to relevant open education resources and developing programming on relevant topics. Katya said she’s excited to join SPARC at this transitional time for the open education field.
“I really love this work and being able to connect with people in different contexts on OER,” she said. “Being in this VPO role is a wonderful opportunity to do that at an even larger scale and at a national level.”
Katya is a coauthor of How Libraries Can Shape the Next Era of Open Education in the journal, Katina. She has a Master of Library and Information Science from Syracuse University in Syracuse, New York, and Bachelor of Arts in Classical Civilizations of Greece and Rome from the University of Rochester in Rochester, New York.