Liliana Diaz Solodukhin

Question #1: Tell me about yourself and how you came to be involved with Open Education.

My name is Liliana Diaz Solodukhin and I’m a Policy Analyst at the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education. I’m also a doctoral candidate in the Higher Education Department at the University of Denver. Hopefully, we’ll be proposing this summer for my first three chapters. I identify as Latina. I am a First Generation student from a low-income background, giving me a unique lens through which I look at things and approach to Open Education.

I became involved with Open Education because my boss said, “we have this project and we think you’d be a good fit for it.” I didn’t know anything about Open Education. I used Google, watched a lot of the videos, and went down rabbit holes in my efforts to learn more because Open Education is so expansive. There’s so much activity and it’s difficult to catch up. Sometimes I feel like I’m getting whiplash because there’s faculty and how they engage in Open, and then there’s the student perspective, and then the publisher’s, and the policies. It’s a lot.