10 Think Open Fellowship Award

The University of Idaho Library’s Think Open Fellowship Awards are opportunities to equalize access to educational materials in your classroom and save your students money by supporting the use of low or no-cost course materials in place of traditional costly course materials. ^[1] Think Open Fellowship Awards are given to instructors who implement varying level of open aspects to their courses, and are intended to be a stipend to encourage and reward this valuable work. To date, the Think Open Fellowship program has saved students over $500,000 in estimated cumulative course materials costs.

Instructors interested in pursuing a Think Open Fellowship spend 1-2 semesters working with their library liaison, a digital initiatives librarian, or our Open Education Librarian Marco Seiferle-Valencia to develop a package or product for their course. These Think Open Fellowships demonstrate the wide range of activities that might fall under the umbrella term of open pedagogy.

Some examples include:

• Creation of original digital textbooks such as:
  • Integrated Musicianship: Aural Skills – by Miranda Wilson
    • An Open-Source, interactive, online textbook for college-level music courses.
  • Inquiry-Based Music Theory by Sean Butterfield and Evan Williamson
    • An Open-Source, interactive, online textbook for college-level music theory courses written and designed by Sean Butterfield and Evan Williamson.
• Adoption of existing Open textbooks such as:
  • A Physics OpenStax Think Open Fellowship project developed by PhD student Russ Miller: learn more here.
  • Creation of OER for K-12 classrooms and College of Education undergraduate courses such as:
    • Rebekka Boysen-Taylor’s Teaching Anna Murray Douglass lesson plans
    • Janine Darragh’s trauma-informed ESL lesson plans, created for use in Nicaragua and Syria and shared in 2021 with students at Central American University, Managua, Nicaragua.^[2]