Grants Overview

Applications for Affordable Materials Grants Round 25 are due on March 11, 2024.

If you’ve received one of our grants, congratulations! Now it's time to check the grantee information center for reporting templates, guidelines and deadlines.

Our Grants

Transformation Grants

Transformation Grants support individual instructors, teams of instructors, and entire departments, along with supporting professional staff, in replacing existing commercial textbooks and materials in a specific course with no- or low-cost student learning materials.

  • Adoption, adaptation, and/or creation of open educational resources, such as open textbooks and ancillary materials.
  • Adoption of library materials available in GALILEO and USG libraries at no additional cost to students.
  • Adoption of no-cost materials outside of OER, such as freely available websites and multimedia.
  • Adoption of low-cost materials, not exceeding $40.00 total per student.

Continuous Improvement Grants

Continuous Improvement Grants support projects that increase the sustainability of open educational resources through substantial revisions and the creation of new materials.

  • Revision of OER used in existing courses
  • Creation of ancillaries for existing OER courses
  • Replacement of current OER in courses with new/improved OER

Research Grants

In order to learn more about how implementations of open resources affect various aspects of instruction and student outcomes, new research studying the impact of open educational resources and open pedagogy also qualifies through the same funding structure as a Continuous Improvement Grant project.

Research projects in this subcategory must address one or more aspects of the Open Education Group’s COUP Framework (Cost, Outcomes, Usage, and Perceptions). The linked article contains many examples of areas of research within OER and student success.

applications icon 800+ applications received
applications icon 500+ projects funded
applications icon $7 million grant dollars disbursed

Affordable Materials Grants are intended to:

  • Explore and expand the transformation of standard course materials to include the adoption, adaptation, and creation of open educational resources (OER); the adoption of materials available through GALILEO and USG libraries; and the use of other no-cost and low-cost materials.
  • Provide support and time to faculty, librarians, instructional designers, and other professional staff to meet, plan, review, and implement these approaches.
  • Work toward equitable access to educational materials and lower materials costs for students, contributing to retention, progression, and graduation.

If you need more information, contact program director Jeff Gallant at jeff.gallant@usg.edu.