Library Toolbox for Faculty and Staff

The Joyce McKnight Fellowship 

Full Details are Available with the Application Form Here 

We will accept applications for review until January 17th. Applications will be reviewed in the order in which they're received. 

The library is thrilled to announce the Joyce McKnight Fellowship program. Dr. Joyce McKnight was a longtime Empire University community member and a tireless Open Educational Resources champion. In her honor, the library is offering fellowships with awards between $2000 and $5000 per participant or team. The proposal below outlines a program that will support the faculty of the Empire University Community in efforts to remix, update, and adopt existing Open Education Resources (OER). The fellowship program's goal is to promote the broader use of high-quality OER while focusing specifically on leveraging existing resources for adaptation rather than on creating new OER objects or content. The program’s goal is to support a diverse set of projects across academic disciplines to increase the accessibility and quality of OER as well as assist with the college’s overall goals of making courses more affordable for students.  

Program Goals:  

1. Increase Adoption of OER at SUNY Empire. 

2. Promote OER remixing and revision.

3. Encourage Affordability for students. 

Program Eligibility: 

1. Be a faculty member at Empire State University

2. Have a plan to remix, revise, and adopt existing OER materials for a specific course or educational program. 

3. Demonstrate alignment with program goals for OER adoption.  

4. Commit to making the resulting OER materials freely available for use and reuse by others by working with the campus OER librarian to make the revised OER available in the University digital repository. 

Fellowship Structure:  

The goal of the program is to fund between 5-10 fellows or teams with the number of fellows dependent on the number and quality of applicants received. The amount of funding per project will range from $2000 to $5000 depending on the complexity, scope, and quality of applications received. Fellows will be asked to submit a brief application and then the projects will be reviewed by a small board of members of the Empire State University faculty for final selection. We anticipate the timeline for the fellowship from application to completion of projects to be no more than 12 months.  

We will be accepting applications for the fellowship with the following project types: 

• Remixing an existing OER – For example, one could combine multiple OER resources to create a new cohesive set of materials with a specific course in mind.  

• Updating an existing OER – Revising outdated content or adding content that was missing from the original OER. This could also include added accessibility features like alternative text, video citations, or more inclusive language and images.  

• Adopting an existing OER – Taking an existing OER and altering it to fit into a particular course or academic program.  

• The McKnight Fellows program will consider applications for original OER projects with the caveat that the proposed program is modest in scope and could be expected to be completed within the stated 6-12 month period.