Designing a Student Affordability Guide: Open Education for Basic Needs Literacy

Presenters: Ery Caswell, University of Connecticut The Student Affordability Guide embraces open education as a practice of meeting students' material and financial needs through open, collaborative design among often scattered and siloed partners and services. This session introduces a dynamic LibGuide that centralizes and connects students to essential campus and community resources for access to food, housing, course materials, and other material needs while embedding everyday life information literacy (EDIL) instruction about navigating complex human and social service systems. Participants will learn how the guide was developed and reapproached as a living, open educational resource in partnership with students and campus partners and explore strategies for adapting this model to their own institutions. The session highlights ways to keep affordability guides responsive, student-centered, and grounded in open access and offers a role for academic librarians to leverage their information organization, access, and design skills in service of a broader student support network beyond traditional academic research.