Liliana Diaz is currently a policy analyst at the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education (WICHE). WICHE is an organization that supports sixteen member states and territories across the west promoting innovation, cooperation, resource sharing, and sound public policy to strengthen higher education’s contributions to the region’s social, economic, and civic life. In addition to her professional role as a policy analyst, she is a doctoral candidate at the University of Denver in the Morgridge College of Education’s higher education department.
Liliana’s capstone was the development of an Open Policymaking Framework and Equity Competency Scale. The Open Policymaking Framework helps guide OER practitioners and campus leaders with communicating their needs for adoption and scaling of OER to system-and state-level policymakers while maintaining a decentralized model. The Framework advances collaboration among practitioners and policymakers to advance OER and Open Education more broadly. The Equity Competency Scale can then be utilized to evaluate a policy’s commitment and alignment to equity and OER. The Scale can be used to map whether a policy is looking at different dimensions of equity such as increasing accessibility, modality of materials, data transparency, representation of diverse views, and promoting self-determination within the creation of Open materials and resources.