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Faculty: apply for up to $5,000 to develop an Open Textbook for your UW course

Deadline April 15, 2018

UW Faculty are invited to propose an Open Textbook project in which class materials can be tailored, remixed, made more interactive, and will create alternatives to commercial textbooks by encouraging new pedagogical models for classroom instruction, challenging the current textbook publishing environment, and making textbooks available at no cost to students.

Projects chosen to adapt an Open Textbook by combining or remixing new or existing openly licensed content to bridge gaps in available open textbooks will be funded from $750-$2000.

Projects chosen to create a new Open Textbook will be funded from $1000 - $5000.

Recipients must sign an agreement to certify the final work will be published under an Open license. See additional requirements and deadlines.

More about Open Educational Resources (OER)

Applicants must submit a statement of support from their department and complete the online Grant Proposal Application by April 15, 2018.

Projects will be judged using the following criteria:

-          Estimated savings to UW students and number of students impacted

-          Openness of proposed content, with CC-BY license as the preferred license

-          Potential for proposed content to be adopted by other courses or sections

-          Inclusion of a clear plan to assess student learning outcomes

-          Innovation in teaching and learning (e.g. including students in textbook creation process, integrating textbook with active learning exercises, etc)

-          Inclusion of plan to use and update the text over the course of multiple quarters or academic years

-          For adaptations of existing open textbooks, quantity of new material being created

-          Feasibility of project being implemented by Autumn Quarter 2019

Awards were created to remove the obstacles to student success: in a survey by US PIRG of over 2,000 college students, 65% reported that they hadn’t bought a textbook for a class due to the cost. According to the UW Financial Aid Office, Undergraduate students spend nearly $825 on books and supplies every year, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that retail prices for college textbooks have increased 88% from 2006-2016.

Awards are funded by the Kenneth S. and Faye G. Allen Library Endowment.

More information is available online or by contacting Chelle Batchelor, Director of Access Services, UW Libraries.