open_book_neonTonight (April 10th, 2014) during the New Horizon’s Excellence in Education Awards dinner,  Chancellor Glenn DuBois will be announcing the next round of the Chancellor’s OER Adoption Grant. Because you are reading my blog or following me on Twitter, you get an advanced peek at the grant details and online application. Don’t say I never gave you nothin’.

Building on the success and momentum of the 2013 grant, which produced twelve high-enrollment, faculty-developed courses in which all required materials are free and openly licensed, the next phase of the Chancellor’s project will focus on increasing OER adoption by incentivizing VCCS faculty content experts to build and curate a library of open educational resources . The 2014-15 grants will be awarded to individuals who will form multi-college content teams to identify and review open content for high-enrollment course sequences (BIO 101-102, CHM 111-112, etc.). Each grantee will receive $1000 to collect these materials as well as  use them  to build and pilot their own OER courses at their respective colleges. Other VCCS faculty will be able to confidently select from this curated content to incorporate into their courses however they wish.

This OER development model of content teams has been used successfully in the Kaleidoscope Project, an effort several of our colleges are participating. Grantees will be supported by Lumen Learning.

For more information about the grant, or to fill out the online application, follow this link to my Chancellor’s OER Adoption Grant page. You’ll find out more grant details and links to the RFP and online application. The turnaround time for applying is pretty short: the deadline is April 28th, 2014. Good luck!