Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching (CELT)

2021 CT OER Grant Program & Information sessions

Call for Applications for the Connecticut Open Educational Resources Grant Program is open for all Connecticut faculty.

During its inaugural year, the grant program was able to support 1,015 students from 13 different institutions across 60 course sections to avoid over $171,000 in textbook costs. On average, 90% of those students completed their coursework with 79% of those students receiving a letter grade of ‘C’ or better.

Public Act 19-117 Section 147 has provided over $90,000 for this second grant round for faculty and academic departments within Connecticut’s higher education institutions to explore, adopt, supplement, and create Open Educational Resources (OER).

The deadline for applications for this opportunity is February 15th, 2021.

In support of this call, the council has scheduled three information sessions for those interested faculty:

  • January 21st at 12pm ET
  • January 26th at 10am ET
  • February 1st at 4pm ET

Register for information sessions here.

About the grant opportunity
The Connecticut Open Educational Resources Coordinating Council is pleased to announce the return of the Connecticut Open Educational Resources Grant Program to continue the support of Connecticut higher education institutions’ efforts to increase access, affordability, and achievement for students through the incorporation of open educational resources (OER). The grant program focuses on OER opportunities in “high impact” areas – courses with high enrollment and high textbook costs for which high-quality OER already exists.

The Connecticut Open Education Resources Grant Program is available to all Connecticut higher education institutional faculty and will support projects in the following categories:

  1. Review – Evaluate an openly licensed textbook or other open content related to your course(s)/ discipline and write a review for public display. Where possible, student involvement in the review is strongly encouraged.
  2. Adoption – Adopt an existing open textbook or open course content with little to no changes made to the content.  Where possible, student involvement is strongly encouraged. This is for an individual faculty member seeking to transform their course by adopting OER materials.
  3. Supplemental – Develop missing ancillaries for currently adopted OER such as quiz question banks, lecture slides, or lab manuals. Where possible, student involvement is strongly encouraged. This is for an individual faculty member seeking to substantively supplement their adopted OER materials.
  4. Impact – For collaborative, larger-scale proposals not covered by the categories above that demonstrate a high impact on student success through the use of OER. Cross-institutional collaborative proposals, as well as student involvement, are strongly encouraged.  Examples include (but are not limited to) Course-wide Adoptions, Collaborative Supplemental Creations, and Creation/Significant Revision of stand-alone instructional materials.

For more information, including instructions, evaluation criteria, and requirements of grantees, please visit the Connecticut Open Educational Resources Grant Program site.