🌐Overview

Sustaining and scaling open education requires strategic funding, structural support, and institutional commitment. A solid funding and support system values the emotional, intellectual, and creative work in open education. It ensures that the benefits of OER reach everyone, not just those with the privilege of extra time.

📖 Table of Contents

Recognize and Support the Labor Behind Open Work
- Addressing "Redlining" in OER Labor
- Addressing "Redlining" in OER Labor
Identify and Leverage Funding Sources
- External Grants and Resources
- Institutional Grants
- Develop a Campus-Based OER Grants Program
Managing OER Grant Programs
CA Focus: ASCCC Resolutions
- Resolution 13.01 S22: Institutionalizing OER
- Resolution 13.02 S19: Supporting Local OER Coordinators
- Resolution 09.05 S19: Funding Faculty Labor for OER Work

✔️ Recognize and Support the Labor Behind Open Work

Open education is not "extra" work. It is core academic work that advances institutional missions of access, equity, and innovation.

📌 Addressing "Redlining" in OER Labor

OER creation and adoption often fall on faculty willing to work overtime, usually without extra compensation. As Rajiv Jhangiani warns, when open relies on unpaid labor, it risks replicating systemic inequities.

Strategies for fair support

Offer stipends, release time, or summer funding for OER work.
Include OER work explicitly in faculty evaluation, tenure, and promotion guidelines.
Create formal service opportunities for faculty to serve as OER Fellows or Open Education Ambassadors.

📌 Institutional and Organizational Support Systems

In addition to supporting OER work through funding, campus should also build an ecosystem of expertise and care. Questions for mapping support resources on campus

What instructional design support exists for OER or open pedagogy?
Who offers training for tools like Pressbooks, H5P, Hypothesis, or LibreTexts?
Where are your copyright and accessibility experts?
Can you build library support for OER adoption searches and repository creation?

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✔️ Identify and Leverage Funding Sources

📌 External Grants and Resources

📌 Institutional Grants

Map your institution's existing funding landscape and identify grants that could explicitly include OER work. For example:

Research and Innovation Grants. Advocate for open textbook and OER development to be eligible activities under broader research, curriculum development, or innovation grant programs.
Teaching and Learning Innovation Funds. Many institutions fund course redesigns, accessibility initiatives, or innovative pedagogy — OER fits naturally into these categories.

📌 Develop a Campus-Based OER Grants Program

Seeding small projects often leads to ripple effects: early adopters become advocates, and departmental adoption grows from there. If no internal program exists, consider proposing one:

Start small: a few $500–$2,000 awards per year for course adoptions or adaptations.
Prioritize high-enrollment courses, courses required for degrees, or areas with clear equity gaps.
Design a simple application process to lower barriers for faculty participation.
Tie awards to clear deliverables, such as adoption reports, resource sharing, or professional development presentations.

Development Grants

Direct funding for creating or adapting full open textbooks, ancillary resources, or major open course redesigns.
Often awarded through a competitive process based on impact potential, alignment with strategic goals, and project feasibility.

Incentive Grants

Smaller, flexible grants for professional development activities related to OER adoption. You can use these for activities like attending OpenEd conferences, piloting OER in class.
Lower stakes and easier for first-time participants.

Offering both types of grants (development and incentive) can meet faculty where they are, supporting both newcomers and advanced practitioners.

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✔️ Managing OER Grant Programs

Effective practices for managing OER grant programs

Prioritize projects that close equity gaps, increase accessibility, impact large student groups, or demonstrate interdisciplinary collaboration.
Recognize that open work often intersects with full teaching loads. Offer flexibility where possible.
Pair awardees with library, accessibility, or instructional design experts to scaffold their success.
Share completed projects widely through newsletters, showcases, and conferences to build OER culture.
Include diversity, accessibility, and cultural responsiveness as bonus evaluation criteria.
Explore possibilities to stack funding by matching internal microgrants with external grants for bigger projects.

💡Tip: Strategies for success

Tie local funding proposals for OER grants or programs directly to these ASCCC resolutions.
Advocate for permanent faculty reassigned time or stipends tied to OER leadership and adoption.
Embed OER into institutional strategic planning, accreditation documentation, and resource allocation conversations.
Position OER not as "extra" work, but as core to achieving your college’s equity, access, and success goals.

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✔️ CA Focus: ASCCC Resolutions

The Academic Senate for California Community Colleges (ASCCC) supports embedding OER efforts into local college structures, funding mechanisms, and professional development. Recent statewide resolutions offer clear direction for local action:

📌 Resolution 13.01 S22: Institutionalizing OER

Integrate OER into your college’s institutional goals, educational master plan, equity plan, accreditation ISER, and board policies.
Treat OER adoption as a strategy to advance student equity and success.
Encourage the use of sabbaticals and professional development opportunities for OER work.

📌 Resolution 13.02 S19: Supporting Local OER Coordinators

Appoint a dedicated faculty OER coordinator to oversee campus-wide efforts.
Provide institutional support for OER liaisons and coordinators to foster growth in OER adoption and creation.
Recognize that colleges with an active, supported OER advocate show significant increases in OER usage.

📌 Resolution 09.05 S19: Funding Faculty Labor for OER Work

Acknowledge that OER adoption often requires substantial additional labor beyond normal textbook selection.
Support faculty with reassigned time, stipends, and classified professional assistance to research, adopt, adapt, and create OER.
Encourage that all developed resources be openly licensed to expand access and diversity.
Create sample support structures to recognize the labor involved at every stage: reviewing, curating, adapting, and updating OER.

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🖊️ Attributions

Content Adapted from

Working Group Guide Copyright © 2019 by BCcampus; licensed CC BY 4.0, unless otherwise noted.
The Rebus Guide to Publishing Open Textbooks (So Far) Copyright © 2019 by Apurva Ashok; Zoe Wake Hyde; and Kaitlin Schilling; licensed CC BY 4.0, unless otherwise noted.