News

panOpen Education Announces Open Release of Award-Winning Courseware Platform

Press Release
Release empowers institutional control across learning materials and digital tools
Westport, CT – October 28, 2025. Coinciding with the Open Education Conference in Denver, panOpen Education today announced the open release of its award-winning courseware platform under an AGPLv3 license. A commercial license will also be available for educational publishers and EdTech companies. The open-source release aligns with the mission of Open Educational Resources (OER) and provides a practical roadmap for integrating AI under institutional oversight so colleges and universities can govern data, customize capabilities, and avoid vendor lock-in as they modernize teaching and learning.
"We believe the greatest risk of AI in education isn't cheating; it's the worsening of cognitive equity, that is, the gap between students who use these tools to deepen their thinking and those who use them to bypass it," said Dr. Brian Jacobs, Founder and CEO of panOpen. "To address this, institutions should regard the new technologies as complements to their pedagogy rather than replacements of it, adding them purposively when they demonstrably support learning. By open-sourcing our platform, we are providing a foundational tool for that prioritization.”
For a deeper articulation of cognitive equity in the AI era, see Dr. Jacobs’ recent essay on Substack: “Will AI Become All-Too-Normal EdTech?” (brianwjacobs.substack.com).
By providing an open, adaptable platform, panOpen offers an alternative to closed systems, enabling institutions to design learning pathways that pair powerful technology with the human-centric support essential for genuine academic achievement.
The move has drawn praise from leaders across the OER ecosystem.
Dr. Lisa Petrides, CEO and Founder of the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education (ISKME) and the digital public library OER Commons, commented:
“As a strong advocate for open, I believe it is incumbent on us to work together as a community to ensure that the conditions for open education are sustainable. The example of panOpen’s willingness to open-source its platform with an AGPL share-alike license is a huge collaborative win for the field, which I applaud.”
LibreTexts, a large open educational resource library with tens of millions of annual users, will be among the first organizations to deploy the panOpen platform within its ecosystem, with additional providers expected to follow.
"The LibreTexts mission is to provide a comprehensive, community-controlled platform for OER. To achieve this, we need control over not just the content, but the technology that delivers it," noted Delmar Larson, Founder of LibreTexts and Professor of Chemistry at the University of California, Davis. "Adopting panOpen's open-source courseware gives us that control. It allows us to deeply integrate our extensive libraries and the ADAPT homework system into a robust, modern platform that we can shape to meet the specific needs of our faculty and students. This moves us beyond the traditional vendor relationship into a true partnership, co-owning the infrastructure that is critical to our mission of providing free and accessible education to all."
As part of this initiative, panOpen Education will assume two key roles in support of adopters and the broader community:

  1. Support Services. For institutions choosing to self-host the source code, panOpen offers on-demand support, from installation and hardening to collaborative content development and AI tool integration. For those preferring a turnkey solution, panOpen provides fully managed hosting with SLAs and compliance (accessibility, privacy, security, uptime), plus access to a catalog of 100+ interactive OER-based titles.
  2. Collaborative, Institution-First AI Roadmap. panOpen is partnering with adopters (self-hosted and managed) to co-develop an institution-first LLM roadmap to align with mission, values, and governance requirements.
Tom Caswell, Chief Learning Officer at Saylor Academy and a longtime panOpen collaborator, remarked:
“I’ve watched panOpen evolve from a bold idea into one of the most thoughtfully engineered OER platforms in our field. It respects academic freedom, streamlines adoption, and gives educators the data they need while keeping learning resources truly open. Releasing panOpen as open source matches the spirit of OER and will accelerate innovation across higher ed. I recommend panOpen to any institution serious about quality, accessibility, and scale.”
How to Get Started
Download. The source code for the panOpen platform is undergoing its final conversion process and is expected to be available for download in the coming weeks. For more information and to receive an alert upon its release, please visit www.panopen.com/self-hosting

Explore Services. Learn about self-hosting support and managed hosting with SLAs and compliance.

Join the Community. Collaborate with peers on an institution-first AI roadmap centered on cognitive equity.

Media & Inquiries. Contact us at support@panopen.com or click here.
About panOpen Education
panOpen Education is a learning platform and services company empowering institutions and educators with modular digital courseware and OER. Designed by educators, the platform enables faculty to adapt and deliver multimedia-rich course materials that reduce costs while improving the learning experience. Institutions can self-host the open-source (AGPLv3) platform for full control and flexibility or use panOpen’s managed hosting with SLAs and compliance across accessibility, privacy, security, and uptime. The core code is open source (share-alike); a commercial license is available for publishers and EdTech partners. panOpen’s roadmap is community-driven and institution-first regarding AI-implementing tools only when they measurably support teaching and learning and advance cognitive equity.

Learn more here.
2025-10-28 09:48