Affordable Learning

The University of Southern Indiana provides stipends for faculty to review, adopt, adapt, or create Open Educational Resources (OER) for their courses. The primary goal of the OER Stipend Program is to reduce the cost of textbooks and other course materials for students, yet provide access to high-quality, pedagogically creative, open educational content for teaching, learning, and research.

All teaching faculty and instructors are invited to apply for stipends, which are administered by the Rice Library and the Provost's Office.

Review Stipend Participants

• Attend a workshop provided by USI's OER Team.
• Submit review to the Open Education Network (link will be provided) by project completion date

Adoption, Adaptation, and Creation Stipend Participants

• Must assign stipend resource within two semesters following the stipend period.
  E.g. Stipend work in Fall 2022 must be incorporated into a Spring 2023 or Fall 2023 course (or both!)
• Submit stipend product and associated course numbers/semesters by project completion date
• Share all stipend product work under an open license (e.g. Creative Commons licenses)

Open Textbook Peer Review

• Amount: $250
• Complete a structured peer review of a resource in the Open Textbook Library
• The review template and a link to submit the review will be provided after faculty have attended an OER Workshop

OER Adoptation

• Amount: $500
• Adopt an existing OER, with little revision to the content, into a zero-cost course.

OER Adaptation

• Amount: $800
• Adapt existing OER with major revisions, or develop custom course content from multiple OER and/or original open content in order to support learning objectives not met by existing open resources. Courses must have $0 material costs (apart from lab or art equipment, if relevant) to be eligible for stipend.

OER Creation

• Amount: $1000
• Create a substantially new OER where it is possible to demonstrate that quality resources are not currently available to meet learning objectives. The resulting OER must be integrated into a course wtih $0 material costs (apart from lab or art equipment, if relevant) to be eligible for stipend.