Open Educational Resources

Open Education Initiative

OPEN EDUCATION INITIATIVE

The 2025 Award Application has closed. Award winners will be notified in Late May.

The University Libraries are preparing to launch the 2025 Open Education Initiative (OEI) Grant Award Cycle. The grants provide funding for instructors to adopt, adapt, or create Open Educational Resources (OER) or incorporate open pedagogical practices (OEP) into their courses. OER are teaching materials released with an open license, which allows for their free revision and redistribution with attribution to the creator of the original work. OEP represent teaching and learning techniques that draw upon open and participatory technologies and high-quality OER in order to facilitate collaborative and flexible learning.

The initiative aims to:

Encourage the development of alternatives to high-cost textbooks by supporting the adoption, adaptation, or creation of OER.
Provide support to faculty to implement these approaches.
Lower the cost of college for students in order to contribute to their retention, progression, and graduation.
Encourage faculty to engage in new pedagogical models for classroom instruction.

Priority Categories

Priority funding will be given to projects that propose creating OER for a high-enrollment general education course.

Expectations

Below is a list of expectations for award recipients. Please read carefully before applying.

Write a final grant report that includes a narrative summarizing the challenges and accomplishments of your experience creating/finding/using the materials, the impact on your teaching, the impact on students and their performance, and lessons learned.
Agree to share the results of your project with other faculty in your Department and the campus via meetings, workshops, or promotional materials.
Circulate a qualitative and quantitative survey to all of your students at the end of the first semester you utilize the materials.
Provide a copy of the revised syllabus or course outline used for the class.
Participate in long-range assessments of the Open Education Initiative.
Materials developed for a course will be licensed with an appropriate Creative Commons license of the grantee’s choice.
Agree to potentially participate on the review committee for future applications.

Selection Criteria

Proposals will be reviewed by representatives from the Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL), the Instructional Design, Engagement, and Support (IDEAS) group, the Learning Resource Center, and the University Libraries. Proposals will be reviewed on the following rubrics:

Transformative impact on student savings and/or student success.
Organization, planning, feasibility.
Qualitative and quantitative measures.
Clarity and alignment.
Pedagogical innovation.

You can view the rubric used by Reviewers here.

Here is a sample OER Accessibility Evaluation Rubric to help build your accessibility plan.

Timeline

Proposals are due Sunday, April 27, 2025
Email notification of successful proposals will be sent by May 19, 2025.

Support & Resources

You are encouraged to submit questions or requests for pre-submission consultation to Student Success & Open Education Librarian Theresa Dooley at tdooley@umass.edu. We are able to answer questions, discuss open licensing and copyright, and outline technological, pedagogical, and research support.

OEI Information Sessions

Learn more about the 2025 Open Education Initiative, including the application process and criteria, and have the opportunity to ask questions about your specific proposal or project. Here is the handout from the OEI Information Sessions.

Application

The 2025 Application has closed.