Hi, I'm Megan Zara, founder of The Open Practice Academy, and the person you'll actually be working with, not routed around.

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I started TOPA because I kept seeing the same thing happen, in classrooms and conference rooms alike: good people, good intentions, and no system underneath any of it. A program that only worked because one person remembered how. A team that meant to document their process and never found the hour. A leader trying to build something sustainable with nothing but sticky notes and memory.

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That's not a discipline problem. It's a design problem. So that's what I do, I help people and organizations build learning, training, and change initiatives that are actually doable, not just admirable on paper.

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My background is in open education, digital learning, and literacy, most recently building the Open Education Trailblazers Program at the University of Texas at Arlington. I'm now doing this work full time while completing a PhD in Leadership and Change, which means the research feeding your project is often research I'm sitting inside of that same week.

 

Everything I build runs on the same underlying discipline: open practice. It means I design so the next right step is obvious, so the system survives without you needing to be a hero, and so nothing depends on any one person's memory. Including mine. 

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Everything here is human-directed and AI-assisted. I use tools to move faster, but nothing reaches you unreviewed. I read every deliverable before it's yours.

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Want the fuller story, my background, the research, how TOPA actually came together? Or if you want the scholarship, the essays, the writing this practice is built on, that lives at meganzara.com.