The President’s Innovation Award recipients have been announced. The $10,000 award divided into two.
$6,400 went to Rashmi Koushik, Sean Allen and Catherine Berkenfield, who collaborated to put together a proposal titled Open Source Textbook for ABE/ESL/STEPS (the English 070 Series). $3,400 went to Winnie Li for her proposal, “Statistics and Analysis”.
In addition to the $10,000, President Dr. Rule gave $500 mini-grants to Li Liu, proposal “Communication Studies 280: Intercultural Communication,” Russ Payne, “Open Source Introduction to Philosophy”, Mark Storey, “Free Online Logic,” Miranda Kato, “Leadership Excellence Through Diversity and Conflict,” and Linda Walker, “Visual Communication Fundamentals.”
“The award is an opportunity to fund and incentivize faculty innovation around the use of Open Education Resources for courses that hopefully have broad impact in lowering the cost of education for students,” says Marika Reinke, faculty commons director. In other words, the award aimed to inspire BC faculty to come up with a way to use Open Educational Resources to lower the cost of education for students.
“Open Educational Resources,” explains the announcement detailing the purpose and rules of the award, “are free, usually openly licensed, high quality education resources that include but are not limited to online textbooks and […] media video libraries.”
The Faculty Commons collaborated with BC President Dr. David Rule to choose the winners. The Faculty Commons Council screened applicants’ proposals for impact, scope, quality, community building, sustainability, scalability, innovation, and assessment among other qualifications; they then passed their rankings onto Rule, who decided on the final grant winners.
Berkenfield hopes their “proposal will be publicized so that future applicants can see the depth and breadth of our proposal as they create their own.”