The VCU Libraries Affordable Course Content Awards (ACCA) program is celebrating its tenth year of providing support for faculty in creating, adapting, or adopting existing open educational resources (OER) for use in their courses.

The program is a project of the VCU Libraries Open and Affordable Course Content Initiative, which aims to ease the burden of textbook costs on VCU students. The initiative began to take shape in 2015 in response to a request for library support from the Department of Focused Inquiry; they wanted to create a new writing guide for their undergraduate writing courses, and they wanted it to be openly licensed and freely accessible. Scholarly Communications Librarian Katharine Miller joined the project team, kicking off an open education movement on campus. 

The initiative grew substantially in its first few years, starting with outreach to encourage faculty to adopt OER. Eventually, with the support of key stakeholders such as the Dean of Libraries, the Center for Teaching and Learning Excellence, and the Provost, the ACCA program received $20,000 in pilot funding and selected an initial cohort of seven faculty projects. 

“The beginning of the initiative and the program were serendipitous. Everyone we talked to was on board and wanted to help,” said Miller. She notes that although there was a learning curve for both the faculty participants in redesigning their courses and for the library in developing the program, widespread interest in the program was evident: “It’s a testament to the faculty at VCU that there were passionate people focused not just on student savings, but also on improving the quality of their courses.” 

That early request from the Department of Focused Inquiry eventually became one of the faculty projects in the first cohort in 2017. A team of faculty continued to develop the early version of the writing guide for undergraduate writing courses UNIV 111 and UNIV 112. The faculty team created a website, VCU Writes: A Student’s Guide to Research and Writing as a hub for enrolled students.

The VCU Writes project is a hallmark of how open education projects grow over time. Since its start, the site expanded to support students taking UNIV 200 with support from an additional grant in 2022. It has impacted over 37,000 students and has generated nearly $3 million in student savings by replacing the previously-used, costly textbook. 

In 2025, the Department of Focused Inquiry once again formed a team to update the VCU Writes resource. Their priorities were to ensure that VCU students have access to materials that are relevant and up-to-date and to provide robust, dynamic teaching materials for the faculty who teach those critical foundational courses. A project team of faculty from the Department of Focused Inquiry applied to the VIVA Open Creation grants, a statewide program that supports Virginia faculty in creating open educational resources that meet an identified resource gap. The project team was awarded nearly $50,000 to overhaul and refresh the resource, and the project is anticipated to impact nearly 7,000 VCU students per year and yield a $475,200 textbook cost savings over the next five years. 

Another high impact project from the early days of the grant program is Digital Histology, supported by the 2018 grant cycle. Digital Histology is a web-based open educational resource that provides a comprehensive atlas of microscope images, medical illustrations and descriptive text to help students learn the structure and function of cells, tissues and organs. Originally created to support students in the medical curriculum, this resource has been adopted in both the School of Medicine and the School of Dentistry at VCU, plus other graduate programs at VCU and throughout the US. The project lead, John Bigbee, Ph.D., Professor in the Department of Neuroscience and Anatomy, notes, “It is highly gratifying that Digital Histology is now being used by learners globally, on all continents. This open educational resource provides high quality histology instruction, free of charge, to anyone with an internet connection.”

Since the program’s early days, it has continued to grow and evolve, involving stakeholders and partners beyond just that early, scrappy team made up of a library representative and a handful of faculty members with a big idea. The grant program has been sustained through partnerships with several other units on campus and has been supported financially by donor contributions, including the Barbara Ford Endowment of the 21st Century Fund and The Friends of VCU Libraries.

Jimmy Ghaphery, Associate Dean for Scholarly Communications and Publishing, VCU Libraries, notes the breadth of support from across the VCU campus and beyond, “Reflecting on the past decade, I am deeply impressed by how many groups have contributed to the success of the Open and Affordable Course Content Initiative. This has truly been a team effort, driven by faculty, students, the Provost's Office, Technology Services, the Registrar's Office, the Friends of the Libraries, donors, the VCU Bookstore, the Center for Teaching and Learning Excellence, and VIVA, with outstanding coordination from VCU Libraries.”

At this stage in the program’s maturity, a focus is developing a stronger publishing infrastructure and more robust services for faculty. In 2024, VCU Libraries launched its own Pressbooks site, a publishing platform for online, openly-licensed textbooks, a critical piece of infrastructure in supporting open textbook projects. Later that year, the Initiative shared its inaugural publication on Pressbooks, the Affordable Course Content Awards Authors Guide, a companion to the program and a resource for faculty interested in learning more about open education and creating open materials. Since its initial publication, the Authors Guide has grown to include new topics, reflecting changes to the open education field, such as resources on digital accessibility compliance, information about using AI in open textbook creation, and resources for faculty on describing open education work in their promotion and tenure materials.

In 2025, the program publishing infrastructure continued to evolve with new workflows to align with publishing best practices. As one example, grant-supported textbooks are now assigned digital object identifiers (DOIs) at publication. DOIs are the standard in book and article publishing, and they serve as a permanent digital tag for publications. These steps ensure projects remain findable, trackable, and are accurately described, especially as they may evolve over time. 

Most recently, in early 2026, VCU Libraries piloted a print-on-demand service, which would allow students and faculty to purchase print copies of their textbooks, whereas previously only digital versions were available. These print copies are offered at cost, meaning the price covers only the cost of printing and shipping. This service allows students to choose the format they prefer while still aligning with the program goals of supporting textbook affordability. 

These changes to the program infrastructure have expanded the capacity, along with strengthened support and partnerships across campus have increased program capacity. VCU Libraries has been able to support larger projects over time, including awarding its first department-wide ACCA grant in 2023, a collaboration between faculty in the School of Business Marketing Department. This project involved seven faculty members and two students, hired to provide graphic design and copyediting services. It aimed to create a highly localized textbook for marketing students, drawing on local examples from Richmond to create a learning experience for students that feels relevant to their lives. The resulting text, Marketing Principles from the River City, was published in Spring 2026, and has already received recognition, first as a finalist in the Innovations in Teaching competition of the Society for Marketing Advances and later, being selected as Pressbooks’ Book of the Month from a national pool of submissions. 

As the program has grown, its impact has also grown. Since its inception, the program has supported 51 projects, which have impacted over 95,000 students and yielded around $9.2 million in textbook cost savings. Looking to the future, the program and its impact expect continued growth as more projects are published and used year after year in VCU courses. 

Abbey Childs, Open Educational Resources Librarian, reflects on the history of the ACCA program, as well as what’s ahead. “It’s been exciting to see how the program has evolved over time and it’s been especially fun to think about what new services we can add or how we can improve our workflows to offer better support. It’s also encouraging and gratifying to see how the seeds that were sown in the earliest stages of the program have yielded incredible impact over time. It makes me hopeful for the future; this program is not only bringing down costs for students, but creating a real culture shift at VCU that will yield more accessible and more transformative learning experiences for students here at VCU and beyond.”