Open Educational Resources

Textbook Affordability Champions 2025

The Textbook Affordability Champions Event is designed to honor students, faculty, instructional designers, and other staff who are working to increase textbook affordability for ERAU students.  Nominations will be solicited from faculty, staff, and students on each campus.  Honorees will be announced during Open Education Week and featured in the Textbook Affordability Champions gallery.

Each nominee will be considered based on the following criteria:

• Actual/potential impact on university and broader education community
• Engagement with ideals of open education and textbook affordability
• Effective use of technology and collaborative partnerships
• Creativity, thoughtfulness, and innovation in implementing alternative learning materials

Eligibility:

1. Current teaching faculty, non-library staff, instructional designers, or students from any of the three campuses.
2. Prior Champions are eligible for nominations, but cannot be awarded the distinction in consecutive years.
3. If a nominee is nominated as a single person and as part of a collective group nomination, they can only be selected for one nomination or the other.

Requirements:

1. Nominee has demonstrated a notable contribution to textbook affordability and/or open education at Embry-Riddle through the advocacy for, use of, or creation of alternative textbook materials or access models to support student success. 
2. Nominee demonstrates dedication to principles of Open Education, such as: concern for student cost burden, use of technology or innovative teaching for learning and accessibility, and collaboration with the university libraries, CTLE, other support units, or other faculty.
3. Must be nominated during the open nomination period.

Selection:

Selection judges are volunteers recruited from student representatives, faculty committees, and university support units such as Hunt and Hazy Libraries, and CTLE.  Judges will vote on winners based on the evaluation criteria below, selecting from the nominees submitted by the community.

Evaluation Criteria and Examples:

1. Impact on ERAU students and the global educational community. 
   1. Cost savings for students
   2. Download numbers for faculty-authored materials in Scholarly Commons
   3. Evidence of sharing materials/supporting other faculty with open education efforts
2. Engagement with the goals and ideals of open education and textbook affordability.
   1. Advocacy work
   2. Support student creation, editing, or publishing of learning materials
   3. Ongoing development of open resources/library resource adoption in courses, such as continually updating their materials for relevancy or by converting more courses over time.
3. Leveraging technology and resources on campus to further these goals. 
   1. Publishing in Scholarly Commons, Canvas, or other platforms free to students.
   2. Using library course reserves, ereserves, or ebook collections.
   3. Integrating ERAU created materials that are no-cost to students, such as videos, support materials, trainings, etc.
   4. Leveraging Canvas tools to alleviate the need for additional textbooks or homework platforms
   5. Collaborating with Hunt or Hazy Libraries, CTLE, departmental partners, or other support units on campus.
4. Creativity and thoughtfulness when adopting, creating, or adapting open, free, and/or library resources.
   1. This is a broad category but can include things such as:
      1. Evidence of prioritizing courses with high costs
      2. New and innovative ways to making information accessible to students, or replacing expensive access codes
      3. New or innovative ways to reduce other course material costs
      4. Evidence of planning for long-term usefulness