Contributed by Josh Bolick

The University of Kansas (KU) is a flagship public research university located in Lawrence, KS, enrolling about 25K students. KU has a long history of advocacy and support for open access to scholarly literature, in 2009 becoming the first public U.S. university to adopt a faculty open access policy. It was natural enough to add OER to those efforts, starting in roughly 2015 when we joined the Open Education Network (OEN). Institutional OER efforts are anchored in KU Libraries, but enjoy significant support beyond the Libraries, for example via a campus-level Textbook Working Group and KU’s Open Language Resource Center.

In KU Libraries, OER programs are supported by a small team of folks that collaborate across units. Initiatives include small grants for instructors implementing OER, memberships in organizations like SPARC and OEN, support for creation and publishing of OER, consultation and training, and, starting in 2019, Textbook Heroes. “Textbook Heroes are members of the KU community who’ve taken extraordinary initiative to increase access to and affordability of required course materials by implementing and advocating for OER and other low and no cost course materials.” We established this effort “to acknowledge and express gratitude for advocacy and innovation in course materials affordability.” In short, Textbook Heroes is a low cost, high impact way to celebrate folks involved in OER creation, use, and advocacy, to demonstrate the breadth of people, projects, and modes of engagement, and to generate visibility and goodwill around our efforts. We make no claim to having invented this concept; in fact, we benefit from the spirit of sharing projects, ideas, and examples from those who established similar projects before KU, like at UT Arlington, UT San Antonio, and Austin Community College (so much great OER work happening in Texas!). Similarly, our program isn’t the only or necessarily best way to establish and leverage Textbook Heroes, but our implementation has worked great for us and we’re happy to be able to share our experience for others to adapt to their goals and contexts.

To date, Heroes come from our existing networks; primarily OER grantees, other adopters we’re aware of, and advocates we’ve worked with in some capacity. There’s a note on the initiative site that nominations are welcome, and that’s something we want to develop more intentionally in the near future. Heroes get a portrait session with a professional photographer (we’re extremely lucky in this respect; LeAnn Meyer is a partner on the Textbook Heroes initiative and has a photography side hustle, at which she’s very talented). The resulting portraits are professionally edited and provided at no cost to heroes to use as they wish. They also get a short public profile (example: Peter Bobkowski), featuring a portrait and a summary of their project or contribution and its impact, which they can link on social media, on their CV, and so on. Finally, we try to imbue the recognition with a sense of celebration by announcing them at relevant events (such as for Open Education Week), having them featured in campus newsletter, social media posts tagging relevant units, and a message of gratitude to their chair or supervisor, inviting them to celebrate their colleague with us and to share with their department. What we get out of Textbook Heroes is a chance to celebrate the good work that our students, faculty, and staff are doing to advance OER and affordability, which we hope inspires others to take action. We get a regular communication opportunity that reaches most of campus (in the newsletter and social media announcements), reminding them of OER, problems it addresses, and Libraries’ support for it, which helps to signal boost and promote related initiatives, like grants and support for OER publishing (such as through Pressbooks).

The labor to adopt, adapt/create, and advocate for OER can be thankless and invisible. Textbook Heroes and similar projects may help to address that by creating a venue for celebrating the many ways different stakeholders engage with OER to save students money, to make their classrooms more inclusive, or to improve their pedagogy. Without significant investment (we don’t attach funding to the recognition, but you could if you had it and wanted to) we’ve created a point of acknowledgement, anchored in gratitude, that advances related initiatives and increases awareness at regular intervals (each spring and fall semester). As far as we know, everyone involved to date has felt great about it, and I think this contributes to positive associations with OER across the institution, as well as a growing community of practice and advocacy. We’re not changing lives, but we are contributing to a culture of recognition and appreciation, and those little bright spots can be deeply appreciated, especially in the midst of significant challenges.

If you’re thinking about establishing Textbook Heroes at your institution, here are some additional resources that may help; adapt at will:

• OEN Summit 2020 presentation on KU Textbook Heroes, featuring Josh, LeAnn Meyer, and Meggie Mapes (recording, slides)
• Example Textbook Hero invitation email
• Example press releases: program launch, Spring ‘20 cohort announcement
• Example email to Textbook Hero department chair
• Example social media promotion

This effort wouldn’t be possible without excellent colleagues, particularly my Textbook Heroes collaborators LeAnn Meyer and Leah Nelson Hallstrom, as well as OER Working Group colleagues Carmen Orth-Aflie, Karna Younger, Heather MacBean, and Neal Axton. Reach out if you have any questions not answered here! If you’re inspired to start a similar project at your institution, we’d love to know how it goes, lessons learned, and if you improved on our example!

This post is by Josh Bolick and is released under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license, except where otherwise indicated. Please reference OER and Beyond and use this URL when attributing this work; for more information on licensing, see our Open Access Policy.