Member Spotlight: Rebecca Karoff
In open education, a University of Texas administrator finds a way to remove financial and academic barriers and build campus community all at once.
For Rebecca Karoff, who serves as Associate Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs in the University of Texas System, tasked with removing barriers to student success and closing outcome gaps, open education is a vessel for the values that are central to how she works, leads, and collaborates.
Rebecca's path into open education began with library leaders in her system who understood that open education isn't just about free textbooks, but a worldwide movement with the capacity to remove financial and academic barriers and build campus community all at once. There wasn't a single lightning-strike moment of conversion, she says, but rather "a constellation of moments": the influence of passionate change-makers across her institutions, and early days working with other state and system leaders through DOERS.
Her email signature carries a line from Toni Morrison's Beloved: "Definitions belong to the definer, not the defined." For Rebecca, open education is inseparable from the project of meaning-making: ensuring that everyone gets the opportunity to define themselves and their own education, especially those at the margins.
What she wants now, in the next five years, is for more high-level institutional leaders to own open education work: to name it, claim it, fund it, and commit time and people to it. "This is our work, too," she says, "not just the work of librarians, instructional designers, faculty champions." She's fighting for the elevation of open from the margins to a systemic practice, where shared responsibility and barrier-breaking are central.
Want to share your story or nominate someone else? Complete the form.