Facilitator Network

Amy Minervini is an English instructor at Lewis-Clark State College in Lewiston, Idaho. Previously, Amy was an Openness, Pedagogy, Advocacy, & Leadership (OPAL) Faculty Fellow for the State of Idaho, and as part of the English cohort, she co-edited Write What Matters, a modular open access composition textbook. She is the co-editor of two other open access first-year writing texts. She earned her Creative Commons Certificate and is a member of the Creative Commons Global Network. She most recently served on the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion committee for the Open Education Conference in addition to reviewing proposals and moderating sessions. She was awarded the 2021 GEM Innovative Educator Award in Written Communication in Idaho. Her research interests include open pedagogy, diversity, equity, and inclusion, and fantasy football.

Liza Long is an Assistant Professor of English at the College of Western Idaho. She has completed both the Rebus Textbook Success Program and the Creative Commons licensing certificate for educators. With her colleagues Joel Gladd and Amy Minervini, Liza co-edited Write What Matters, an open education resource first-year composition modular textbook designed for Idaho’s state board of education outcomes. Liza earned her Ed.D. in organizational leadership and hold a B.A. and M.A.in Classics (Latin and Greek). She has taught English, humanities and student success courses at the college level for several years and is passionate about the power of open education to change lives.

Joel is the Department Chair for Integrated Studies and teaches at the College of Western Idaho, with a content expertise in American literature, but he is equally passionate about open access, open education, and inclusive teaching pedagogy.He is a TSP alumnus, who worked on a collaborative project to produce the open text Write What Matters. He has facilitated the May 21 TSP Cohort in 2021-22

For years, Jonathan Poritz was one of those tattered minstrel mathematicians one sees wandering dusty backroads with nothing but chalk on his coat and a theorem on his lips: in total, he studied and taught mathematics and computer science at around a dozen universities in five time zones on two continents, most recently in a fifteen-year stint at Colorado State University Pueblo. He has also worked in various IT firms, from start-ups to multi-nationals, doing things like AI, cryptography, and consulting on public policy towards technology. Building on a lifetime of using free/libre/open-source software, Jonathan has for the last decade been involved in the open education movement, writing three OER textbooks and serving on the Colorado OER Council. In his spare time, he teaches the Creative Commons Certificate course and writes snarky articles about the over-hyping of blockchains. Much more information about him, including (almost) everything he’s written, (almost) all of it released under an open license, can be found on his website.

Dr. Bryan McGeary is the Sally W. Kalin Librarian for Learning Innovations and the Learning Design and Open Education Engagement Librarian at Penn State University. In this capacity, he helps advance the University’s initiatives that support the creation and use of open and affordable course content and associated teaching practices. He has led programs to support faculty creation and adoption of open educational resources, student co-creation of OER, and the creation and adaptation of OER to support social justice aims. He was also the principal investigator for an IMLS-funded project that piloted a library-led service model for supporting open-source homework systems as supplemental resources for teaching with OER across the Big Ten Academic Alliance.

In 2022, he received the OE Global Open Pedagogy Award, along with his colleague Christina Riehman-Murphy, for the Open Pedagogy Project Roadmap, a resource they designed to assist instructors in planning, finding support for, sharing, and sustaining open pedagogy projects. Bryan is a 2020-2021 SPARC Open Education Leadership Fellow, an instructor for the Open Education Network Certificate in Open Education Librarianship, and a facilitator for the Rebus Open Publishing Projects Certificate Program.

Kaitlin is the Associate Program Manager at Rebus Community and one of the authors of The Rebus Guide to Publishing Open Textbooks (so far). Prior to completing their graduate certificate in public administration from Humber College, Kaitlin studied psychology at the University of Windsor. She has previous experience in community-based program delivery in areas such as student services, career development, and most recently open education. A graduate of the Textbook Success Program and collaborator on Pulling Together: Manitoba Foundations Guide (Brandon Edition) with the Manitoba Foundations Group, Kaitlin is committed to equitable storytelling.

Julie M. Meyer, M.S.I.T., is an instructional Designer with the Learning Design Group of Teaching and Learning with Technology (TLT) at Penn State University. She is based out of the Penn State Schuylkill Campus in Schuylkill Haven, Pennsylvania. She is a graduate of the Textbook Success Program, February 2020 Cohort, and leads the Faculty Engagements for the Affordable Cost Transformation program at Penn State. Julie is a Penn State Extension Master Gardener. She likes to garden, Line Dance, spending time with family, and visits to the Poconos.

Stacy Katz is an Associate Professor and Open Resources Librarian-STEM Liaison at Lehman College, CUNY. She initiated, developed, and oversees the Open Educational Resources (OER) initiative for the college. Stacy’s research to date has focused on OER, particularly how librarians develop and support OER initiatives, faculty professional development in OER, and student views on OER. Stacy is a 2018-2019 OER Research Fellow and 2019 Institute for Research Design in Librarianship Scholar. Her research has appeared in peer-reviewed journals such as Open Praxis, Journal for Multicultural Education, and the New Review of Academic Librarianship. To promote the research on OER within the City University of New York, she developed and maintains the CUNY OER Bibliography.

Becca Sibrian is a lecturer of German at Boise State University and a graduate of the February 2020 Textbook Success Program. With her colleague Franziska Borders, Becca co-edited Grammar to Accompany Deutsch im Blick – a remix of an existing OER for teaching German, housed at COERLL (Center for Open Educational Resources in Language Learning). The TSP was exactly what she needed to jumpstart her obsession with open practices, but also to show her that she, too, could create materials that would be valued by her students and colleagues. Becca received her BA from Boise State and her MA from University of Washington, both in German, and is a passionate collaborator with other language teachers in her region.

Natasha Whitton serves as an Associate Professor in the Department of English and Humanities at Baton Rouge Community College. As an interdisciplinary scholar, she has degrees in biology, literature, and history. Her first experience writing textbooks was in the area of composition. She collaborated on several custom writing handbooks and combined reader and rhetorics with faculty. More recently, she worked on a team to create both an open textbook and course for Western Civilization, particularly for dual enrollment students. In addition to being committed to OER as a tool to increase the accessibility of education, she has served as a faculty fellow for the Great Questions Foundation and for an NEH Institute on Willa Cather. She was awarded a fellowship in 2025 through VIVA and ISKME to explore using AI with OER.

Dr. Esperanza Zenon is a Professor of Physical Science at River Parishes Community College (RPCC). She serves as the Primary Investigator on an NSF ATE Grant Project aimed at improving RPCC’s Instrumentation program. She also serves on the RPCC Faculty Senate as the Westside Representative. Dr. Zenon is the current Past President of the Louisiana Academy of Sciences. Dr. Zenon is very passionate about STEM equity and is a member of the National Alliance for Partnerships in Equity (NAPE). She also champions the use of open content in STEM and CTE, and served on the Advisory Leadership Team for the Regional Leaders for Open Education (RLOE). Dr. Zenon has a Master of Arts degree in Physics from Wayne State University, and a Ph.D. in Science/Mathematics Education from Southern University.

Dr. Elizabeth Robertson Hornsby is a dedicated educator and innovation strategist specializing in strategic communication and media studies, with a focus on emerging technology, data analytics, digital literacy, cultural dynamics, and strategic media management. She is currently an adjunct professor at Southern University at New Orleans. Elizabeth served on the advisory board for the monograph series Pedagogy Opened: Innovative Theory and Practice and was a 2022-2023 OER Research Fellow with the Open Education Group. Through a statewide grant, she has co-authored a Fundamentals of Communication dual-enrollment OER and is currently authoring OER content for undergraduate and graduate strategic communication programs. Elizabeth has been involved in multiple initiatives related to online teaching and OER across the University of Louisiana System, including serving as the 2023 University of Louisiana System’s Content Expert in Online Teaching and Learning.

Ariful is a dedicated learning designer with a proven track record in diverse academic and non-profit organizations, driving technology-driven innovation. Currently, he serves as an Instructional Designer at The Centre, University of Manitoba, where he focuses on Manitoba Flexible Learning Hub (MB Hub). His role contributes to the furtherance of the online learning ecosystem in Manitoba through the MB Hub. Ariful is a passionate advocate for open education in postsecondary institutions. He is also an enthusiastic learner of generative AI (genAI) integration in teaching and learning, exploring ethical and responsive applications in his daily work. Recently, Ariful graduated from the January 2024 cohort of the Open Publishing Certificate (OPC) by Rebus Community.

Mary Isbell is an Associate Professor of English at The University of New Haven. Her research focuses on nineteenth-century literature and culture, narratology, scholarly text encoding, and open educational practices. With Matt Wranovix, she served as PI on the Open Pedagogy Project and she is currently working with a team of humanities faculty to build The Connected Core, an initiative to remove the barriers that often stop professionally minded students from engaging with the arts and humanities. Mary’s current project is Searching for Wonder, an openly licensed book designed to support those who want to teach literature with student-selected texts. She is also working with a team of faculty and developers to build WonderCat, a relational database of story experiences that users can peruse and expand by sharing their own experiences. The tool is an alternative to recommender systems that deliver predictions based on demographics and user behavior. Designed for use in the classroom, WonderCat encourages agency and democratic engagement with scholarly expertise.