Deans OER Incentive

OER Grant Initiatives

Deans OER Incentive

In late 2025, the Office of the Provost approved an initiative developed by the Deans Council to incentivize the adoption of OER (open educational resources) in high enrolling courses, particularly those with high rates of DFW (grades of D & F, and withdrawals) and costly course materials. This Incentive is being implemented in collaboration with Libraries because of our existing expertise in open education and our relationships with campus partners. This Incentive is focused on the adoption of existing OER content, not on substantial adaptation or new content creation, although ancillary content creation will be necessary.

As of Spring, 2026, this initiative is under active development. Additional details will be shared here once they are confirmed. However, if there are departments/instructors interested in immediately pursuing the adoption of OER in qualifying courses for implementation in Fall 2026, please contact oer@ku.edu to discuss.

Incentive Philosophy: Flexibility & Partnership

The program emphasizes:

Flexibility and ongoing modifications based on feedback.
A collaborative, supportive relationship with faculty and departments.
- Course instructors are the experts in their field of study.
- This is an opportunity to work towards shared goals and where a partnership is desired.

Assessment

Assessment is important to measure the impact and to guide future efforts.

This program is designed for courses that don’t currently include OER materials to incentivize new adoptions.
The project’s assessment piece will track data measuring DFW rates before and after OER implementation and whether the use of OER shows improvement in these rates.
If a course currently uses OER a baseline number won’t be available from which to start the assessment.
However, KU Libraries has other initiatives available to support your continued OER use. Please see the Open Educational Resources page for these programs.

Incentive Details

The Incentive will be funded at $225,000 over three years with 2–3 grants awarded per semester.
Initial Incentive amounts:
- $5,000 + $5 per student (up to 200 students) for individual proposals.
- $10,000 + $5 per student for collaborative proposals.
Funds can support faculty stipends, GTAs, and other implementation needs.
Projects should address all sections of a course, not a subset.
In addition to funding, various support and assistance will be provided such as:
- help identifying potential OER for adoption (prior to application)
- navigating Creative Commons licenses and other intellectual property issues
- coordination with other KU units on course design and assessment
- facilitation of access to instructors with experience using OER and mentoring and cohort models within the program.

Next Steps in 2026

The current semester focuses on program setup.
Courses aiming for Fall 2026 implementation are invited to connect early.
Interested instructors are encouraged to reach out to:
oer@ku.edu, heather-macbean@ku.edu or jbolick@ku.edu.
For future semesters, we anticipate a call for proposals in the late summer/early fall 2026.