The trustees of The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation awarded over $4.5 million in support of Open Educational Resources at the October board meetings. Below, we provide a short description of each funded organization/project organized by area of focus. Starting this year, in an effort to become more transparent in our work and to create opportunities for greater collaboration among Open Educational Resources projects, we are making accepted proposals as well as reports openly available on our website. Click here to locate proposals and reports available for viewing. 

1) Carnegie Mellon University (CMU): CMU received continued support of its Open Learning Initiative (OLI), a powerful research and development effort that creates self-contained, open courses whose design is based on recent cognitive science. The open courses convey the full content of existing CMU courses.  One of the components of the CMU work over the next two years will be a series of evaluations to examine whether the OLI may provide students with the opportunity to accelerate their learning.  

2) Alexandria Archive Institute: A central focus of the grant will be developing a sustainability model for their Open Context Project, an effective and flexible open-access, web-based resource for organizing, sharing, and enhancing research using social science data, particularly archaeological data. 

3) Rice University Connexions: Connexions was one of the first open educational repositories available on the web. The central purpose of this grant is to improve the usability and adoption of the Connexions platform and to explore ways of making the Connexions organization sustainable. One component of the proposed sustainability effort will be to engage high-quality faculty in developing ten or more digitized textbooks for high-enrollment community college courses. The textbooks will be made available for free on the web and printable on demand at a cost of roughly one-third of conventional textbooks.

4) Utah State University’s Center for Open and Sustainable Learning (COSL): COSL’s grant will support its work on building tools that facilitate the construction of OCW and to carry out the planning and analysis necessary to develop a project that would draw together full courses from many sources to reside within a central repository.