The OER Microgrant Program supports small projects that advance the use, improvement, and adoption of open educational resources (OER) and the development of open teaching practices at the University of Virginia. These grants are intended to encourage experimentation, reduce barriers to participation in open education, and generate openly shared resources that benefit both UVA students and the broader educational community.
Microgrants support projects that can be completed within a relatively short timeframe and that produce clearly defined outcomes. Proposals for components of larger projects are welcomed. The program invites a wide range of ideas that improve access to course materials, enhance teaching and learning, or expand the availability and usability of openly licensed instructional resources.
The benefits of participating in this program include the following:
- Grant funding, at the levels specified below.
- Library support, including project management, copyright and license advising, best practices for use of AI in OER, accessibility remediation, OER discovery, identifying publishing and conference opportunities, and publishing in Pressbooks or other formats.
- Participation in a cohort of faculty practitioners.
Funding categories
Three categories of funding are available.
Category 1: Adoption - $500
Supports efforts to adopt an open educational resource for a current or planned course.
Examples:
- An instructor teaching an Introduction to Psychology course replaces a commercial textbook in a high-enrollment introductory course with an open textbook covering equivalent content, making the course materials free for all students from day one.
- A Spanish language instructor replaces a commercial workbook in a second-year Spanish course with openly available exercises, removing the cost for ancillary content that students often have to buy in addition to their textbook.
Category 2: Course component projects — $1,000
Supports projects that improve or develop specific components of a course, such as:
- accessibility remediation of existing OER
- creation of one or more ancillary materials (slides, quizzes, problem sets, datasets)
- development of an open pedagogy assignment (that is, an assignment where students participate in creating class content with an open license)
- AI-enabled enhancement of an existing OER
- Updates or enhancements to one or more existing OER.
Projects in this category typically produce discrete instructional materials rather than using OER in the redesign of an entire course.
Examples:
- An instructor teaching statistics develops original problem sets drawn from publicly available data and then releases them openly for reuse by other instructors.
- A faculty member who previously adopted an open pharmacology module remediates its materials to meet current accessibility standards and then re-releases the new version for broader reuse.
- An instructor teaching writing and rhetoric develops an open pedagogy assignment in which students research and write encyclopedia-style articles on underrepresented topics for a public platform, transforming a traditional research paper into a contribution with a public audience.
Category 3: Course implementation projects — $2,500
Supports projects that involve integrating OER into the structure of a course rather than creating a single assignment or other component, such as:
- authoring a new resource, either from scratch or as the result of significant remixing
- replacing commercial course materials with curated open resources
- using open resources to implement open pedagogy across a course
- developing a comprehensive set of ancillary materials supporting OER adoption
Examples:
- An instructor redesigns a graduate housing policy course so that students research and openly publish policy briefs on local issues. Each cohort’s work becomes course material for the following semester’s students, creating a ‘living,’ community-grounded resource.
- A media studies instructor authors an introductory textbook for a course with no adequate OER equivalent, drawing on publicly available scholarship, primary sources, and the instructor's own expertise to produce a resource that is adopted as the course’s primary text.
- An instructor redesigns a teacher preservice course so that student work throughout the semester culminates in an openly licensed collection of lesson plans and instructional materials aligned to Virginia K–12 standards.
- A global studies instructor significantly remixes and synthesizes several existing open texts in regional studies using AI tools to assist with reorganization and localization of content that results in a cohesive open course reader that replaces a commercial coursepack.
Project outcomes
Proposals must identify:
- a clear project goal or instructional challenge
- specific deliverables, such as revised OER chapters, ancillary materials, assignments, or accessibility improvements
- a plan for assessing outcomes, which may include student feedback, evidence of student learning, or other indicators appropriate to the project
Projects should be designed so that meaningful outcomes can be achieved within the proposed timeframe.
Eligibility and funding
All UVA faculty, instructors, and teaching staff on a nine-month contract are eligible. Collaborative proposals involving multiple instructors or partnerships with library or instructional design staff are welcome.
This is a rolling grant program and will continue until funding is exhausted.
Faculty can receive their awards either as summer salary or as a deposit to a research account, managed by the applicant’s department, through which funds can be used for such expenses as student hourly wages, purchase of equipment and technologies, and other miscellaneous items.
Timeline
Projects should normally be completed within one academic year.
Project requirements
- Open Licensing Requirement
- All materials created or substantially revised through the OER Microgrant Program must be shared as open educational resources.
- Project outputs must:
- be openly licensed, typically under a Creative Commons license
- be publicly accessible for reuse and adaptation
- be registered in Libra, UVA’s institutional repository
- Include appropriate attribution and licensing information
- Projects that produce materials that cannot be openly licensed are not eligible for funding. When adapting existing OER, resulting materials must comply with the license terms of the original work.
- Other Requirements
- participate in brief, regular meetings with Library staff to discuss progress
- share project outcomes in an OER Microgrant Showcase and through departmental or other professional channels
- submit a brief project reflection (one page or less)
Review criteria
Proposals will be evaluated using the following criteria:
- Efficacy: Does the project allow the applicant to address a specific teaching or learning problem (which might include providing affordable resources)? (0-4 points)
- Scope and Clarity: Is the project well defined with realistic outcomes at the funding level? (0-3 points)
- Impact: Could this project—or the way it’s built—benefit other courses or help future OER efforts at UVA? (0-3 points)
- Assessment: How will the applicant determine if the new resource successfully met the instructional challenge? (0-2 points)
- Collaborative readiness: Is the applicant ready to work with the library staff and others in the grant cohort in sharing and problem-solving? (0-1 point)
For more information:
- Email lib-oer@virginia.edu to reach the OER team, Judith Thomas and Bethany Mickel
- Attend an information session