Course Material Fellowship Program

The Course Material Fellowship Program (CMFP) supports Bloomington faculty members to adapt and/or create their own openly licensed course materials, specifically OER. Fellows will develop projects that use OER, library-licensed, and/or public domain materials, and some of our Fellows will also create original openly licensed resources. The program’s purpose is to eliminate textbook costs for students while giving faculty academic flexibility to tailor their materials to their learning objectives and pedagogical preferences. 

Looking for help but can’t take on a fellowship? IU Libraries offers support beyond the CMFP, including a guide on finding and evaluating OER and consultation services. We also offer an asynchronous OER adoption Canvas course to walk you through adopting an OER without edits.

Current Call for Proposals

2025-26 CFP for Fellows now open!

Contact Haley Norris (hjnorris@iu.edu) for additional information. 

"This has been an amazing experience for me. I’m pretty thrilled with how [my OER] turned out. I’ve got quite a bit more I want to fix, add, and update, but the students’ reviews from the spring were super-positive and I’m excited to provide the resources to others who may find them useful.”

-Rick Hullinger, 2020 Fellow, Senior Lecturer and Director of Undergraduate Instruction, Psychological and Brain Sciences 

“I learned about a lot of interlocking university-based resources that, collectively, really are effectively offering alternatives to traditional for-profit publishing models. I didn't realize the extent to which the university can challenge a corporate capitalist structure.” 

- 2020 Fellow

Goals

The Course Material Fellowship Program supports instructors in their efforts to adopt and create zero-cost course materials. Instructors are provided with a stipend, the expertise of librarians and instructional technologists, and the opportunity to learn alongside their peers. Fellows are encouraged to utilize a variety of solutions and strategies to transition to zero-cost course materials. These may include Open Educational Resources (OER), library eBooks and databases, and instructor-created materials. The goals of the Course Material Fellowship Program are to:

  • Lower the cost of college for students, contributing to their retention and progression
  • Make course material access on the first day of class a reality for all students, regardless of socioeconomic status
  • Encourage the development of alternatives to high-cost textbooks by supporting the adoption, adaptation, and creation of Open Educational Resources (OER)
  • Support instructors in navigating the variety of affordable course materials solutions available and aggregate instructor supports across campus into one space

Student Savings

Fellows in Progress  

  • 6 instructors  
  • Over 600 students 
  • Over $77,000 in cost savings in the first semester, $540,000 each subsequent academic year they continue to use their resource instead of a traditional textbook  

Previous Fellows 

  • 17 instructors  
  • Over 6,000 students 
  • Over $300,000 in cost savings in the first semester, over $535,000 each subsequent academic year they continue to use their resource instead of a traditional textbook  

Cost savings are general estimates based on instructors' predicted enrollment when applying. 

Other Impact

  • Customized course materials that match IU instructors’ unique pedagogical goals and teaching style 
  • Development of ancillary materials like question sets, projects, and checks for learning that complement the text without costing the student  
  • Furthering instructors' ability to assign materials that are best suit for their course  

Course Material Fellows

Yingling Bao is working with faculty from Northwestern and University of British Columbia to co-create a text for Chinese in Social Science (EALC-C467 here at IU). She is a Senior Lecturer for the East Asian Languages and Cultures department and have developed teaching materials on topics such as public health, popular culture, and gender minorities. Existing advanced-level Chinese textbooks focus on limited types of genres and topics. This project aims to create an OER textbook that covers a wide variety of topics in various genres.  

Heather Perkins, a Visiting Assistant Professor for Psychological and Brain Sciences, currently uses an OER text for PSY-P 304 Social Psychology which they are going to enhance by creating a “psychologist spotlight” for each chapter due to the original text’s lack of diversity. The “psychologist spotlight” assignments were designed to emphasize diversity within the field of psychology and introduce students to contemporary researchers. While the psychologist spotlights have been a positive step, framing them as supplementary continues to marginalize racial minorities. To better center the voices of people of color and individuals with marginalized identities in social psychology, Dr. Perkins hopes to integrate the spotlights directly into the text. 

Katherine Ryanand Ben Ale-Ebrahim are a Kelley Communication and Professional Skills Area team working to create an edited volume that pulls together information from any number of existing OER sources to produce a no-cost customized resource for our first-year students. In doing so, they expect to create their own content that frames the information of each section/chapter/module, as well as provide introduction and appendix sections. These materials will be for BUS-C104 Business Presentations and could impact over 4,000 students annually.

John Talbott is a Senior Lecturer for Kelley’s M419 Retail Marketing Strategy. They already use a variety of public domain documents to lessen the financial burden for their students and wish to combine/curate materials into an OER text that can be utilized by others in the department. For custom images, diagrams, and organizing the work, Dr. Talbott plans to use AI generative tools. We are excited to see how AI can assist and impact the labor behind building OER.

Mallory Barnes, O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs 

  • Course: SPEA-E 538 Statistical Analysis for Environmental Science 

  • 35 students impacted with a projected total cost savings of $4,060 

Xin Chen, Kelley School of Business 

  • Course: BUS-C 204 Business Writing 

  • 75 students impacted with a projected total cost savings of $8,700 

Jim Davis, Department of Anatomy, Cell Biology, and Physiology 

  • Course: ANAT-P 215 Basic Human Physiology 

  • 400 students impacted with a projected total cost savings of $46,400 

Leslie Gabriele, Department of Second Language Studies 

  • Course: Intensive English Program Levels 3-6 Reading (four different courses) 

  • 40 students impacted with a projected total cost savings of $4,640 

Phil Jordan, Department of Informatics 

  • Course: INFO-I 400 Applied Science Fiction in Human-Computer Interaction/design 

  • 40 students impacted with a projected total cost savings of $4,640 

Asaf Lubin, Maurer School of Law 

  • Course: B531 Torts 

  • 40 students impacted with a projected total cost savings of $4,640 

Gregory Carter, IUB, Department of Nursing 

  • Course: NURS-B Families and Populations 

  • 100 students impacted with a projected total cost savings of $11,600 

L. Anne Delgado, IUB, Department of English 

  • Course: ENGL-W 131 Basic Writing 

  • 150 students impacted with a projected total cost savings of $17,400 

Brandi Emerick, IUB, Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences 

  • Course: PSY-K 300: Statistical Techniques 

  • 100 students impacted with a projected total cost savings of $11,600 

Genevieve Shaker and Meng-Han Ho, IUPUI, Lilly Family School of Philanthropy 

  • Course: PHST 105 Giving and Volunteering in America 

  • 175 students impacted with a projected total cost savings of $20,300 

Matthew Josefy, IUB, Kelley School of Business 

  • Course: BUS-J 304 Strategic Management 

  • 210 students impacted with a projected total cost savings of $24,360 

Adam Maltese, IUB, School of Education 

  • Course: EDUC-Q 205: STEM for Educators 

  • 75 students impacted with a projected total cost savings of $8,700 

Roxie Barnes, IUB, Department of Nursing 

  • Course: BL-NURS-H467 Complex Processes 

  • 40 students impacted with a projected total cost savings of $4,640 

Kathy Berlin, IUPUI, Department of Health Sciences 

  • Course: HLSC-H 365 Diversity Issues in Health and Rehabilitation Services 

  • 50 students impacted with a projected total cost savings of $5,800 

Megan Hansen Connolly, IUB, Department of Second Language Studies 

  • Course: SLST-T 131 Academic Writing 

  • 360 students impacted with a projected total cost savings of $41,760 

Kim Donahue, IUPUI, Kelley School of Business

  • Course: BUS-M 374 Honors Marketing: An Integrated Experience 

  • 300 students impacted with a projected total cost savings of $34,800 

  • OER: Marketing: An Introductory Text 

Heaven Hollender, IUPUI, Department of Health Sciences 

  • Course: HLSC-H 264: Disability and Society 

  • 70 students impacted with a projected total cost savings of $8,120 

Rick Hullinger, IUB, Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences

  • Course: PSY-K 300: Statistical Techniques 

  • 80 students impacted with a projected total cost savings of $9,280

  • OER: K300 Videos and Resources 

Valia Kalaitz, IUPUI, Department of Global Health 

Sapna Mehta, IUB, Department of Biology 

Amy Powell and Julia Sanders, IUPUI, First Year Engagement Program 

Miranda Rodak, IUB, Department of English 

Shana Stump, IUPUI, Department of Political Science 

  • Course: POLS-Y 380 Gender and the Law 

  • 35 students impacted with a projected total cost savings of $4,060 

Sample Project

Sapna Mehta, Lecturer in Biology, created a customized Open Educational Resource for her Introduction to Molecular Biology course (BIOL-L211). The course is required for Biology majors at IU Bloomington, but the text originally assigned was costing the 200 students that take the course each semester almost $100 each. Sapna compiled existing OER on the topic, edited the content to match her course, and then added her own materials. The result is a learning resource that is interactive and engaging. View Sapna’s OER in Pressbooks or in our institutional repository, IUScholarWorks.  

a screenshot of the Pressbook for a Molecular Biology Course, includes the cover image and abstract describing the resource

 

Partners

The Center for Innovative Teaching and Learning (CITL) and UITS have been core partners in the CMFP. These groups offer workshops and consultations to Fellows and also serve in an advisory capacity on the CMFP Implementation Group.  Naz Pantaloni, Head of IU Libraries' Copyright Program, has also been an integral partner in understanding copyright, Creative Commons, and Fair Use. 

Learn More

Previous Fellows’ projects: