Instructor & Faculty OER Awards Initiative
AggieOpen Fellows Pilot Program
Instructor Awards for using Open Educational Resources
Have you ever thought about using open educational resources in your classes, but it seemed overwhelming? The UC Davis Library’s AggieOpen Fellowship initiative can help make it happen!
The AggieOpen Fellows program supports instructors who plan to incorporate alternatives to commercial course materials, including open textbooks, open-access monographs, and other openly licensed learning objects. The AggieOpen Fellows program can support instructors in developing openly licensed resources to address curriculum or content gaps in available OER.
What is the AggieOpen Fellowship?
AggieOpen supports UC Davis faculty and instructors to adopt, adapt, create, or curate openly licensed, freely accessible course materials, known as Open Educational Resources (OER). In launching the Fellows pilot program, the Library seeks to expand the availability of openly licensed educational materials for the benefit of UC Davis and higher education students globally.
Funded by LibreTexts and the UC Davis Library, the Fellows program will make available awards of $2,000 - $7,500 to faculty and instructors teaching undergraduates to adopt or adapt openly licensed, freely accessible course materials.
Over the program period, the AggieOpen team will provide Fellows with professional development opportunities to support their activities in finding, evaluating, and creating OER, in addition to awards that reflect the associated costs and recognize the time and effort involved.
We hope to identify Fellows eager to learn and work alongside us as we further develop a process through this pilot program.
Who can apply?
The AggieOpen Fellows program is open to all Academic Senate and Academic Federation faculty and instructors.
What types of course materials are eligible?
The AggieOpen Fellows program supports instructors who plan to incorporate openly licensed alternatives to commercial course materials (ex., open textbooks; open-access publications). The AggieOpen Fellows program can support instructors in developing openly licensed resources to address curriculum or content gaps in available OER.
AggieOpen encourages potential applicants to contact the review team prior to the submission deadline for assistance in project development. Librarians are available for consultation to help identify openly licensed resources for adoption or adaptation.
Applications may be submitted in one of the following three tiers:
For faculty and instructors who have identified open learning materials appropriate to their curriculum and would like support navigating the licensing and distribution of these materials.
Individual awards
Instructors transition from a commercially licensed textbook to an open textbook, open access texts, and/or other openly licensed learning materials (question banks, instructional media, etc.). This may include making modest changes to existing open materials.
$2,000 award
- Example: Professor Dawson will begin teaching the History of United States course series and would like to adopt the open textbook, American Yawp, from Stanford University Press. This will require revising the curriculum. Fortunately, the American Yawp website also provides teaching materials that include sample course syllabi, exams, quizzes, and essay assignments and a primary source reader.
For faculty and instructors who have identified open learning materials but need to make significant revisions, annotations, and/or create instructor resources appropriate to their curriculum.
Individual awards
Individual instructors incorporate portions of multiple existing open textbooks and other freely available educational resources, undertake significant modifications of existing open education materials/textbooks, or develop new open education materials that support existing texts.**
$5,000 award
- Example: Professor Yamata plans to adopt the open textbook Psychology as a Biological Science from the Noba platform. However, the Noba textbook does not cover neural networks at the level of detail needed for this class. To address this gap, Professor Yamata will also incorporate sections of the open textbook Foundations of Neuroscience. Additionally, they plan to curate openly licensed videos from TedEd and images from the Open Neuroscience Initiative.
For faculty and instructors who have identified open learning materials but need to make significant revisions, annotations, and/or create instructor resources appropriate to their curriculum.
Team awards
Multi-section course teams of at least two instructors adopt and modify open educational resources/textbooks for use in all course sections addressed by the instructors.
$7,500 award
- Example: Professors Aquino and Jorgensen plan to adapt the open textbook Introduction to Environmental Science. Hoping to make the course materials more culturally relevant to their students, they plan to create case studies, discussion questions, and assignments for each chapter that are regionally focused on California ecosystems and populations.
*Materials created with the support of this award must be licensed under a Creative Commons license or public domain, allowing for re-use. Suitable Creative Commons licenses include: CC0, CC BY, CC BY-SA, or CC BY-NC.
**Open educational materials adopted or created for this pilot program will be reviewed to ensure inclusive language and representation, as well as the UCOP Electronic Accessibility Requirements, are met.
Want to learn more?
Fellows Application
For information about the AggieOpen Fellows program, including timeline, project deliverables, and how to apply, please refer to our application page.
AggieOpen programming and initiatives are made possible through the UC Davis Library's lead partner, LibreText.