We are pleased to announce that through grant funding from the Davis Educational Foundation, the Library is sponsoring two faculty incentive programs for expanding open educational resources at UConn: one offering $250 for textbook reviews and one offering $1,000 mini-grants for transitioning established course materials to open educational texts.
Recent research has demonstrated that open textbooks – low or no cost alternatives to traditional textbooks – are positively correlated with student success. And more broadly, open educational resources (OERs) are scholarly content available freely online for instructors and students to share, use, reuse and build upon, including formal materials like textbooks. In order to facilitate a conversation on how UConn could explore and implement more of these resources, a university-wide initiative was launched in 2015.
Details about each incentive program and the application forms are available at Faculty Incentives on the new Open Educational Resources website. These are competitive awards, with funds available for approximately 8 book reviews and 3 course adoptions in 2016.
For more information, contact: Kathy Labadorf at kathy@uconn.edu