Did you know that you can get paid to learn about, find, review, adopt, and even create Open Educational Resources (OER)? It can often be hard to find the time and support to research OER and plan how to incorporate them into our classes. And sometimes, while searching for materials, we may discover that resources in a topic area are lacking and become interested in creating a text to use and to share with others. Our campus now has a number of grant opportunities available for LEO and tenure track faculty and staff to support the various stages of exploration, implementation, and creation of OER, as well as to help fund professional development activities.
I recently was awarded $400 to write a landscape review of texts geared towards teaching essay writing, particularly creative nonfiction. With the help of the OER Toolkit that I wrote about in an earlier blog post, and meeting with Raya Samet and Autumm Caines, I created a list of texts that could be used in creative writing, composition, or other disciplines with a writing intensive designation.
Spending time with the resources on that list has helped me to consider incorporating aspects of some of them into my own classes, and potentially creating an OE text in the future. You can also review a single resource and don’t have to make a whole list like I did.
While planning for the winter or upcoming semesters, I hope you’ll consider applying for grant funding and beginning or continuing your own OER journey with support from campus OE experts. You can find more details about each grant and how to apply on the InfoReady site.
Grant open to faculty and staff:
Education Grant – These funds can be used on professional development opportunities to learn more about Open Education.
Faculty Grants:
Review Grant – Described above; you can do either a landscape review or a review of a single resource. This grant is a prerequisite for all the grants that follow.
Adoption & Remix Grants – Once you have reviewed a resource (or set of resources) you are in a perfect position to adopt or remix.
Creation Grant – If after your review you identify a knowledge gap so large that a whole new resource is warranted you might consider creating something yourself.
Feature Image by Katerina Pavlyuchkova on Unsplash