Have you ever felt like chucking your always out-of-date, expensive, and totally non-remixable (under penalty of law) textbook from the eternally-spalling Courtland Street Bridge? Now’s your chance! The USG’s Affordable Learning Georgia (ALG) initiative is currently accepting grant applications for no- and low-cost course transformations.
ALG Grant Types
ALG offers several different types of grants and levels of funding. Check out the current grant call for proposals for all of the details. In short, you can work on your own, with a partner, or with your entire department on creating or adopting already existing Open Educational Resources (OER) for your course.
An ALG Grant Story
Creating or adopting OER has many benefits including increasing your academic freedom and collaboration opportunities while decreasing course costs and increasing access for traditionally underserved students. For instance, let’s say that you’re a physics professor and you just aren’t happy with the coverage or format of your required text. In addition, many of your students simply can’t afford the $250 price tag. Rather than begrudgingly trudging forward with your text you might, instead, work with a librarian, instructional designer, or fellow physics professor and apply for an ALG grant to adopt a free, peer-reviewed, accessible OpenStax textbook.You’ll probably find that this text still isn’t all that you’ve ever dreamed of – and that’s ok! You could supplement it with articles or videos from high quality, open access journals and websites. You could, additionally, create some materials of your own to go along with the text and supplements. Or, you could even have students create high quality resources as assessment pieces that you could then incorporate into your next course. The possibilities here are endless when you don’t have to worry about copyright.
ALG grants aren’t just about curating OER content – instead, the process involves the creation of an OER course. In other words, you will be sharing your holistic creation with other faculty at the end of the grant period to adopt and remix as they see fit in their own courses. Look at you, all rebellious and everything, helping to make academic work more communal and creative!
For more information specifically on OER, please see our past posts. If you’d like to talk about implementing OER in your class, don’t hesitate to get in touch with us at cetl@gsu.edu.
