Textbook Heroes


Peter Bobkowski

Associate Professor
Journalism and Mass Communications

Peter Bobkowski

OER created: 

"Be Credible: Information Literacy for Journalism, Public Relations, Advertising and Marketing Students"

Student impact:

After five years of teaching JOUR 302, I recognized the demand for a textbook that immediately addressed the learning needs of our beginning journalism students. There were resources on information literacy, and there were traditional reporting textbooks, but there were no textbooks for budding journalists about how to find and use specific information sources and evaluate the credibility of information — so that was the textbook I set out to write!

What I like most in that we incorporated instructional videos in the OER, freeing up class time. Students get instruction from the videos on their own time so that we can devote our time together to addressing higher-order skills.

Key partnerships:

This OER would not have happened without KU Libraries, the support of Karna Younger and Carmen Orth-Alfie, and the OER Grant Initiative. Karna and Carmen were the catalysts for this project, and their enthusiasm for open education sustained it. These librarian colleagues convinced me to write an OER, and I convinced them to help me.