VCU Libraries’ student worker shapes open ed Initiative, builds real-world skills
Service to students in advocating and creating free or low-cost textbooks is the core purpose of VCU Libraries Open and Affordable Course Content Initiative (OACC). What is not widely known is that student voices and the labor of student employees is a vital voice in the work.
Since the start of the Open and Affordable Course Content Initiative (OACC) in 2017, VCU Libraries has supported the creation of original open educational resources, customization of existing resources, and the use of library-owned content to help students avoid burdensome textbook costs. The benefits to students are clear: The initiative’s impact includes more than $12 million in savings and has impacted over 135,000 students.
Behind the scenes, the initiative is having a positive impact on its student workers, too.
The OACC Student Publications Assistants contribute to the initiative in various ways that are tailored to the skills and interests of the individual student. While all OACC students are responsible for providing publishing and production support for faculty who are creating open educational resources (OER), students have also taken on additional projects that include video editing, graphic design work and coding work. Because peers interact best, students are often assigned to interview fellow students or staff tables that promote free or low-cost texts.
Open Educational Resources Librarian Abbey Childs supervises the student team of two or three.
“The goal is to not only drive the work of the initiative, but to provide meaningful work experiences for our students that prepare them for their chosen career path,” Childs said. “I feel fortunate to supervise a position that offers so many transferable skills, and I spend a lot of time talking with my students about their goals and how we can shape the position to set them up for success at VCU Libraries and beyond.”
Through their work with the initiative, students hone their communication skills, their ability to effectively search for information and gain a new or deepened familiarity with platforms and interfaces such as Excel, Pressbooks, accessibility checker tools, editing software and more. These skills are foundational to careers across disciplines and career paths.
One of the initiative’s inaugural student workers, Damian Ashjian, has been working with the library through his entire academic career at VCU and graduates this spring.
“I applied for this job in my first semester. Coming in, I knew I wanted to be involved in my community and leave an impact lasting longer than my time at VCU. As a low-income student relying on financial aid, I understood how high textbook costs could be a barrier to higher education. Working on an initiative like OACC, I knew I could contribute to reducing those costs and supporting students in similar situations,” Ashjian said.
The initiative is focused on its mission to provide open, accessible and affordable educational resources to all students, and the student workers see that mission, too. Ashjian notes, “Before this role, I knew textbooks were expensive, but I didn’t grasp just how significant the financial burden could be on students. Now, seeing the effort our librarians and faculty put into creating OER for their students, I have a deeper appreciation for their work and a better understanding of how OER improves overall learning experiences. The ability to provide accessible, adaptable, and up-to-date course materials is a powerful example of how technology can drive meaningful change in education.”
Ashjian is a computer science major at VCU and has leveraged his coding skills to further the work of the OACC initiative. Ashjian has worked to improve workflows of accessibility verification by writing programs that can detect accessibility issues in OER, has written scripts to create tools to automatically generate attribution statements for OER, and has adapted code to create a workflow for moving content from Google Docs, where most authors work on their OER chapters, to Pressbooks for publishing. These tools have saved time and improved the quality of the initiative’s project outputs, and the attribution tool has also been adopted at the state level and included in VIVA’s Publishing with VIVA guide.
Working with the initiative has also provided opportunities to engage in open education work beyond the VCU campus. Ashjian and two other VCU Libraries student workers presented on a panel about their work at the statewide VIVA Open and Affordable Community Forum in 2023. Ashjian notes, “I got to share my perspective on OER as a student and how I used my background in technology to expand access to course materials.”
“Damian Ashjian has been an exceptional part of our team,” says Karen Bjork, head of digital libraries and publishing at VCU. “He has applied his technical skills in a way that advances our goals, particularly through his innovative work in accessibility verification for Open Educational Resources. His contributions show how student workers can directly impact our library’s mission while also gaining practical experience that enhances their future careers.”
Ashjian is quick to acknowledge that his work at VCU Libraries has helped shape his future. He’ll soon begin a Master’s degree in computer science at Georgia Tech, focusing on Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). HCI, which examines how people interact with technology, has become a major interest for him, given his experience working on accessibility in OER.
“Through this role, I’ve learned how important accessibility is in design and has been an important step in discovering my passion for HCI,” he says, “Working with OER helped me discover that accessibility isn’t a ‘feature’ of good design, but a foundational part of creating interfaces. Moving forward, I can now ensure any software I help build in my career will be inclusive and usable by all.”
Thanks to students like Ashjian, the OACC initiative has continued to grow its impact. While he will be graduating in May, the rest of the student team, including first-year students Candace Collins and Chelsea Asante, will continue to build and shape the initiative, and develop some new skills and interests along the way.
“I can’t wait to see what’s next,” said Childs, “There are so many directions we can grow as a team and as an initiative, and my students are always surprising me with their skills, interests, and abilities. Wherever we end up, though, I know it’s going to be great.”
Categories Faculty/Staff, Open Textbooks, Students