The University of California is inviting faculty from all UC campuses to submit proposals for developing undergraduate online courses that run fully on UC Online. The university's Innovative Learning Technology Initiative (ILTI) offers financial support to defray the costs of creating fully online courses, and it has set a deadline of Thursday, March 31 at 6pm Pacific time for principal investigators to submit their proposals. To apply, applicants must be UC ladder-rank faculty, teaching professors and assistant teaching professors, and the courses must be "offered during the academic year across multiple campuses and without any additional fees to students."
The maximum award is $110,000 for quarter-long courses, but the average ILTI award to date is approximately $55,000. For semester-long courses, grants top out at $117,000. ILTI guidelines note that faculty seeking to revise a fully online course may apply, but the average such grant is $6,500.
[At right: CSE Prof. Pavel Pevzner teaches bioinformatics for beginners, a Coursera online course that grew out of a "Bioinformatics for Biologists" course developed with funding in the second round of ILTI.]
Under the current Request for Proposals, UC is prioritizing online courses that: target high-need, high-enrollment areas for undergrads exclusively; exemplify UC quality; involve collaboration between two or more campus PIs and departments to develop and teach the course; and generate UC-wide interest and benefits as reflected in letters of support from at least two other campuses in addition to the home campus. Principal investigators also need to submit courses through their respective campuses' regular course-approval process.
Read the Request for Proposals to UC's Innovative Learning Technology Initiative.
Learn more on the ILTI website.