Shared open education resources (OER) can address health professions education content development challenges driven by near-universal time and resource constraints while providing faculty development opportunities. Recent UNESCO education conferences have highlighted the global opportunity for generative AI to transform the development of OER. This interactive session will provide an overview of OER for health professions educators and provide hands-on strategies and generative AI tools for designing and developing high-quality OER. It will also address potential pitfalls and challenges with quality, critical appraisal, copyright and attribution issues when leveraging AI.

Historically, high-quality health professions education has been expensive to develop at scale and limited to major commercial or academic publishers. New digital platforms have accelerated the development of open education resources (OER) which evolved to address critical cost and accessibility issues in education globally. Notably, UNESCO has developed guidelines and policies supporting OER development at the country and institutional level. Emerging artificial intelligence (AI) tools, in particular, offer unprecedented opportunities to streamline content creation, personalize learning, and automate resource curation, further expanding equitable access to quality educational materials. UNESCO has highlighted these potential applications at the Third UNESCO World OER Congress in 2024 and the 2025 UNESCO Digital Learning Week Conference. Finally, novel shared curricular ecosystem platforms can standardize and facilitate the management of OER, empowering a global community of health professions educators to share, collaborate, and go further together. However, AI applications for curriculum design and development are often misunderstood, and educators have limited experience with quality, critical appraisal, copyright and attribution issues when leveraging AI.