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Faculty: Apply for a Grant to Transition to Open Textbooks & Course Materials

Posted January 8, 2025 in JMU Libraries News, Open Education News

Are you concerned about the high cost of course materials for your students? Consider applying for a grant of $5,000 to $50,000 to help reduce the costs of higher education for Virginia students by eliminating the costs of textbooks and other course materials.

Open Course Grants, offered by VIVA (Virginia’s Academic Library Consortium), provide support for the time it takes to integrate existing open or no-cost materials into a course.

Apply this spring for a grant of $5,000 to $50,000 to support a course redesign that makes your course materials more affordable and accessible to students by switching to open, no-cost, or library resources.

This year, these grants have four areas of focus: Content Creation, Open Pedagogy, Open Ancillary, and Large Scale Adoption Grants.

Eligibility

Full-time or part-time faculty may apply. JMU’s Principal Investigator’s requirements necessitate the Principal Investigator (PI) for projects to be a full-time employee. However, to accommodate this, a workaround allows another full-time faculty member to serve as the internal PI, while the part-time employee may be designated as the PI for the sponsor.

Individuals are permitted to participate in multiple project teams, but cannot hold the role of PI in more than one proposal concurrently. Additionally, individuals cannot serve as the PI for more than one active VIVA Open Course Grant simultaneously, including grants received in previous years. (Recipients of an Open Adopt Grant may also PI an Open Course Grant simultaneously.) For questions on eligibility, contact JMU’s Office of Sponsored Programs (OSP) at jmu_grants@jmu.edu.

Get Approval

Before you apply for this grant from VIVA (the sponsor), you must receive approval from the university. To request approval and apply for the grant, please follow these steps:

  1. Visit the VIVA Open Grants Request for Proposals page to download and review the Grant RFP, Grant Application Instructions, and Grant Application documents from VIVA.
  2. By February 5, 2025 at the latest: Contact the JMU Office of Sponsored Programs Administrative Services (OSP-AS) at jmu_grants@jmu.edu to request assistance with budget development. 
  3. By February 26, 2025: Provide the OSP-AS with a completed Internal Approval Form (signed by the PI, co-PIs, and their respective Deans and Academic Unit Heads) and the VIVA application form with the final budget and justification.
  4. By March 5, 2025: Once OSP-AS approval is received, apply for the grant by following the instructions on the VIVA Open Grants Request for Proposals page.  

What Faculty Are Saying

photo of Diana Galarreta-Aima

Diana Galarreta-Aima, Ph.D.

Course: Medical Spanish

Dr. Diana Galarreta-Aima received a $30,000 Open Course Grant–open to all JMU faculty–to create an open educational resource: an online training program for medical Spanish. As professor of Spanish and coordinator of the Medical Spanish minor at JMU, she shared her expertise and knowledge with aspiring interpreters and medical providers around the world and reduced the cost of textbooks for JMU students. Learn how Dr. Galarreta-Aima leveraged JMU Libraries services to create and share her open course. 

“We don’t sometimes think about the cost of textbooks for students. It adds up, you know? This initiative tries to make education open and available. I think that’s what education and universities are for, right? To share education and ideas. I think the more people know about this the better.” – Diana Galarreta-Aima, Ph.D.

Chris Johnson, Ph.D.

Course: Programming Languages

Thanks to a $6750 Open Course Grant from VIVA, Dr. Chris Johnson was able to write Dear Computer–a book focused on programming languages–and provide it free of charge to his students. Dear Computer will save students around $67,500 over five years, and each chapter of this engaging ebook includes coding exercises and questions that increase student engagement and understanding.

“I wrote Dear Computer for many reasons. To save students money, to clarify and organize my own understanding of the material, to perfectly align the readings with lectures and labs, and to gain the power to improve the book semester after semester. I feel agency over the course again, and my students feel considered.” – Chris Johnson, Ph.D.

Learn more

Learn more or contact vivaopen@gmu.edu with questions about this program, funded by VIVA, Virginia’s Academic Library Consortium.

For questions on eligibility or JMU approval, contact JMU’s Office of Sponsored Programs (OSP) at jmu_grants@jmu.edu.