Three faculty projects will receive funding through VCU Libraries’ tenth round of the Affordable Course Content Awards. This grant program supports faculty who enhance the learning experience for students through free and/or open course materials. 

Each awardee creates or customizes open materials with a potential for large impact at and beyond VCU. The newly awarded projects have the potential to save approximately 255 VCU students $123,000 annually.

The Affordable Course Content Awards program is made possible in part through funding from the Barbara Ford Endowment for the 21st Century Fund and The Friends of VCU Libraries.

Award recipients

• Elizabeth Fagan, Ph.D., associate professor in the Department of Focused Inquiry, will compile open access scholarly articles and book chapters to support HIST 303: Greek Civilization. This course on ancient Greece explores the Bronze Age through the death of Alexander the Great. Fagan will take a problem-centered approach, organizing the course materials around a few key “problems” or thorny questions in Greek history.
• Francesca Lyn, Ph.D., assistant professor in the Department of Gender,  Sexuality, and Women’s Studies, and Grace Gipson, Ph.D., assistant professor in the Department of African American Studies, will create an openly licensed, no-cost course resource for undergraduate students studying comics, graphic narratives and visual culture in GSWS 391: Comics, Race, and Gender. The resource will introduce students to the history, formal components and cultural analysis of comics, with specific concentration on comics as a medium of cultural production.
• Dayanjan (Shanaka) Wijesinghe, Ph.D., associate professor in the Department of Pharmacotherapy and Outcomes Science, Lauren Caldas, Pharm.D., M.Ed., BCACP, associate professor in the Department of Pharmacotherapy and Outcomes Science, Krista Donohoe, PharmD, BCPS, BCGP, professor in the Department of Pharmacotherapy and Outcomes Science, and Erica Brody, MPH, MSLS, research and education librarian, liaison to the School of Pharmacy, will use an innovative AI workflow to create a digital textbook to support PHAR 523: Foundations, a course focused on developing foundational pharmacy practice skills.

Beyond creating a resource for a single course, this project will establish a scalable and replicable model for AI-assisted development of open educational resources. The project team  hopes to create a model that pharmacy educators and other health sciences faculty can adapt to develop their own openly licensed textbooks. This approach has the potential to make it easier to create high-quality, course-specific educational resources while increasing access to free learning materials for students.

About the Affordable Course Content Awards

The Affordable Course Content Awards provide financial and project support for faculty as they adopt zero-cost resources or create or customize openly-licensed alternatives to expensive course materials. By removing the financial barrier to access, free course materials increase the possibility that students can succeed in their academic careers. Course materials with open licenses also allow faculty to tailor materials to their specific classes, creating engaging learning experiences for students.  While many resources resemble traditional textbooks, supported course materials can take a variety of forms, including interactive websites, videos, or ancillary materials. 

The program has supported 42 projects in different academic 24 departments across nine cohorts. Past projects include Digital Histology, Biological Basis of Behavior, Foundations of Business (2nd Ed), and Marketing Principles from the River City. Through Summer 2026, funded projects have impacted 1592 sections of 267 courses and 680 professors and saved 91,739 students (duplicated headcount) $9.7 million.

Learn more about the Affordable Course Content Awards or VCU Libraries’ support for open and affordable course content.