Open Course Materials Awards for Instructors
Overview
The AggieOpen Open Course Materials Award provides financial support for instructors who adopt open educational resources (OER) in their undergraduate teaching as alternatives to commercial textbooks.
The AggieOpen team is available to support you throughout your transition to open materials and practices.
Award Amount
Award recipients receive a $2,000 one-time award from the UC Davis Library in recognition of the work involved in identifying, revising, creating, using, or sharing open educational materials as alternatives to commercial textbooks.
Eligibility
All faculty and continuing lecturers who serve as the Instructor of Record for undergraduate courses at UC Davis are eligible to receive an AggieOpen Instructor Award.
Note: This award does not require a course to exclusively use openly-licensed materials. We aim to expand the use of Open Educational Resources at UC Davis and reduce costs for students enrolled in the Equitable Access program. Instructors may still use commercially licensed materials (e.g., films) or library-licensed materials (e.g., journal articles) in their courses as needed.
Funding Details
- Amount: $2,000 one-time award
- Distribution: Paid through UCPath
- Payment Timing: Award is released after the instructor submits their open course materials to the UC Davis Bookstore for inclusion in the Equitable Access program.
- Note: Including open materials in the Equitable Access program reduces overall costs for all students enrolled, even when those materials supplement some remaining commercial or library-licensed resources.
Five Required Steps to Receive Award
AggieOpen: Getting Started is an asynchronous, self-paced professional development course introduces core OER concepts and guides you through the planning process.
- Complete all course deliverables before scheduling your consultation, as they form the foundation of your project plan. These planning documents help map your transition to open materials.
Course deliverables include:
- Annotated syllabus: identify where updates must be made to reading assignments, homework, discussion questions, etc.
- Course materials list: identify openly licensed learning materials for students in the course.
- Hosting and distribution plan: identify where their content will be hosted and made accessible to learners.
- Assessment plan: identify an assessment strategy (ex., feedback survey; focus group) to assess the impact of OER materials on student educational experience.
- Project workflow: identify tasks, steps, checklists, and a timeline for implementation and assessment.
- The course remains open for ongoing reference after completion.
- Deliverables are reviewed by the AggieOpen team, who provide feedback on copyright, licensing, tools, and platforms.
Schedule a consultation to discuss your planning documents and determine the next steps for your project, including recommended tools, tasks, and open resources.
Develop, revise, or select openly licensed resources for your course. This may include:
- Open textbooks
- Open multimedia
- Instructor-created materials
- Adaptations of existing OER
Provide the materials you developed or adopted so they can be included in the Equitable Access program. This helps to lower the overall cost of the program for participating UC Davis students.
Once all required steps are complete, submit your award request to receive your $2,000 payment.