Open Textbook Faculty Incentive Program

The high-cost of textbooks is one of the factors that affects student learning outcomes and student success.  Students avoid certain classes, drop a class, or do poorly when they cannot afford the text for a course.  

The Open Textbook Faculty Incentive Program supports undergraduate students by creating incentives for teaching faculty to use alternative lower-cost educational materials rather than high-cost textbooks.  This may include the adoption or adaption of existing OER materials.  If needed, it will support the creation of new Open Educational Resources (OER) to fill in gaps of your adopted / adapted OER materials.

“Open Educational Resources (OER) are teaching, learning, and research resources that are free of cost and access barriers, and which also carry legal permission for open use.  Generally, this permission is granted by use of an open license (for example, Creative Commons licenses) which allows anyone to freely use, adapt and share the resource—anytime, anywhere.” (https://sparcopen.org/open-education)

Sponsored by the University Library, the Office of the Provost, and the Student Government, a fund is available to faculty teaching undergraduates.  

Interested faculty will be required to submit a proposal (see below for additional details).

1. Proposals will be submitted in one of three tiers:
   • Tier 1 (Adopt)
     • Individual faculty members incorporate an existing open textbook into their course ($500.00 award)
     • Multi-section course teams who adopt an existing open textbook(s) for use in multi-section courses (must be three or more sections) ($500 award per instructor)

• Tier 2 (Modify)
  • Individual faculty members incorporate portions of multiple existing open textbooks, along with: other freely available educational resources, modifications of existing open education materials/ textbook, or development of new open education materials.  Materials available through the library’s collections* may also be included but material used should be minimal.  ($2,000 award)
  • Multi-section course teams of at least two instructors who adopt and modify an open educational resources/ textbook for use in all sections of the course.  (up to $2,000 award per instructor)
• Tier 3 (Create)
  • Individual faculty members write new openly licensed textbooks. (Up to $6,000)
  • Multi-section course teams of at least two instructors write new openly licensed textbooks. (Up to $6,000 per instructor)

OER Awards will be transferred from the Library to a department CFOP.

*Note about use of the Library's Collections: The library will not purchase new resources for this incentive program.   

Open Textbook Review Incentive

Reviews help faculty to decide if adopting open educational resources is right for their course. Up to $2000 will be available for faculty to review Open Textbooks from the Open Textbook Library. $200 will be offered for each review. The allocated money is available on a first come first serve basis. Faculty will provide a concise review of the textbook based on the following criteria: comprehensiveness, content accuracy, relevance, clarity, consistency, modularity, organization, interface, grammatical errors, and cultural relevance. The review will be posted on the Open Textbook Library under an open license. An optional workshop on OER Basics will be available for faculty who want to learn more about OER before writing a review.

OER Awards will be transferred from the Library to a department CFOP.

Funds for reviewing open textbooks are available throughout 2021-2022 on a first come first serve basis. If you are interested in reviewing an open textbook, please contact Sara Benson at srbenson@illinois.edu