“Educational access has been foundational to my teaching philosophy since I began. Students frequently discussed their struggles affording textbooks and the choices they make to be able to afford their education with me, so when I learned about open educational resources, I immediately committed to their use. One course I teach is an integrated communication course that combines first-year writing and oral communication, so I struggled to find textbooks, OER or traditional, that would serve the needs of my students. When I shifted to OERs, I found myself piecing together chapters from a variety of books to create a text that would work for my students. Since my colleagues were faced with the same problem, we decided to band together and work with Anne Marie Gruber, our OER librarian, to create a new text. We found texts that allowed us to work with and change them, pieced them together, and added things we thought were missing. Working together, we created a text that is used by faculty across our program, reaching over 500 students each year and saving them $60,000 annually.”

– Dr. Deb Dimond Young

Cornerstone, 2nd Edition

This Cornerstone textbook is a free, custom textbook for you, published by Rod Library. It is a compilation of materials from seven free, openly-licensed textbooks, customized for UNI students. Your Cornerstone instructors carefully selected the best of the best for your course!

Dr. Harken serves as the Internship Director for the Department of Communication and Media and the co-director of UNI’s Cornerstone course. Her publications include: the Media Career Guide for Bedford St. Martin’s Press and Next Step for Macmillan, both which prepare students for jobs in the 21st century. Nikki teaches a range of courses for the department, including courses focused on speaking, writing, research, and leadership. She finds her students to be exciting, engaging, and entertaining and likes to be innovative and inventive in the classroom, creating mutually beneficial learning environments where her students can be creative, engaged, and produce high quality work. Her goal is to help students find their purpose and passion, to nurture those things, and help them realize “it’s not how smart you are, but how you are smart.” Dr. Harken’s research is rooted in university/college exit programming — essentially, what students experience (knowledge, emotional, social) as they leave the university and how to develop systems that better serve students during their last moments in higher education.

Deb Dimond Young has been teaching writing at UNI since 2012. She received her Ph.D. in Rhetoric and Professional Communication from ISU and her M.A. in Literature from UNI. Her research interests include composition pedagogy, student use of generative AI in writing courses, community-engaged writing, food rhetoric, and feminist rhetoric.

Sadé Barfield is an instructor in the Communication and Media. In addition to teaching, she is also the Director of the Speech Team at the University of Northern Iowa.

An alumnus of UNI (’14 & ’16), Scott Bredman returned in 2018 as an adjunct instructor, and now serves as Assistant Professor of Instruction in Interactive Digital Studies. A dedicated teacher, Scott brings together his traditional education in communication together with his professional experience in technology to give a unique perspective to students taking his courses. Encouraging his students to speak up, experiment, ask questions, and learn through the small moments of “failure” that often come with trying something new, Scott hopes to bring an energy to the classroom that inspires each student to bring layers of creativity to every assignment. An advocate of service-learning, he tends to try to find ways to encourage students to get invested and involved in their community through civic-engagement assignments.