ALX Phase 2 Proposal Guidance

Affordable Learning Exchange grants are intended to support various approaches for course transformation to reduce the cost of materials for students while maintaining excellent teaching and learning at Ohio State. This guide was created to help you articulate project goals, intended savings, and steps you plan to take toward completion of your project.

Please use this document as a guide to completing your Phase 2 proposal. Answers should be given where indicated below each content section. Please use as much space as necessary.

 

Project Overview

Please give a succinct summary of your project.

  • Project Abstract: Abstracts should include a summary and the intended goals of your work.
  • Savings: Using enrollment data and current price of course materials, estimate the cost savings of your project after two semesters of implementation. If you anticipate savings impact to sections taught by others, please indicate that here.
  • Support team: Who will help contribute to your project? Consider liaison librarians or department educational technologists who may be required at distinct stages of your project development. Will the material be collaboratively authored? Do you need to connect with people outside of Ohio State?

 

Transformation and Impact

  • Project tasks: A typical ALX-funded course transformation replaces conventional course materials (like a textbook) with alternatives delivered in multiple formats. In this section, we’d like you to imagine the new items you might use to replace your textbook(s), and the tasks you’ll undertake to produce or source these items. (See examples of typical work here).
  • Before and After: Describe the difference, from a student perspective, between your course(s) now, and after implementation of your project.
  • Accessibility: It is important to consider accessibility from the earliest stages of project development. It is not necessary that you have a background in universal design; instead, we want to know whether you are open and prepared to learning more about these challenges, and working to make your project as accessible as possible.
  • Mission: From your perspective, how will this project align with the ALX mission to improve affordability and drive excellence in teaching at Ohio State?

 

Project Planning

  • Requirements and Challenges: Every project has unique challenges in various phases. Please discuss any potential roadblocks that you see as you progress through development. These could include licensing questions, staffing challenges, skills gaps, content availability, time concerns, etc.
  • Budget: Think about how much funding you will need to complete your project work. Include personnel and projected expenses as appropriate for your budget, and use categories included on the budget worksheet to help you estimate. Funding is typically not a direct stipend to the project lead and/or team members, though exceptions can be made and should be noted on your worksheet. In most cases, funding is transferred to the department and is made available to the project lead to pay for project expenses, or is used to cover a portion of the project lead’s time (salary/release time/overload/replacement coverage), project expenses including related department needs, and travel expenses. The project lead must coordinate as necessary with their department to determine how to handle the distribution, including amounts, release time/overload/salary/replacement as well as semester(s). This provides the maximum flexibility to the department and the team in terms of how many people and what types of skills are needed and amount of compensation vs. replacement of teaching load.
  • Timeline: Please provide an outline of your project timeline, as you expect it. This will typically be a list of milestone dates for your transformation project through the end of the first semester the transformed course(s) is/are offered to students. You and your ODEE project team will use this as a starting point to create a project plan.

 

Implementation

  • Implentation Date: Typical projects that begin in January go into implementation in Autumn of the same year. If you choose to begin implementation in the classroom in either Summer or Spring, make sure it’s clear in your timeline above, and provide justification for this choice. Typical reasons for this include the teaching schedule for a class (class is not taught in Autumn, for instance), or work that has already been done on this project.
  • Measuring Success: The quantitative and qualitative data you collect during the course of implementation will be utilized in your final report as well as within ALX program communications. Describe how you plan to identify, collect and analyze data to understand student impact. Please describe both quantitative (items such as Learning Objective success, Drop, Fail, Withdraw (DFW) rate, and any other critical factors) and qualitative (student feedback through survey or other means) measures you plan to examine.

 

Sustainability

  • Sustainability: What work will need to be done after the completion of your project in order to continue using it for later semesters? Consider any revisions to reflect current events or changes in your discipline.
  • Faculty Development: Will others use your course materials in their course sections? If so, is there a timeline in place for this work? What support will you need (financial, political or otherwise) to make this happen?

 

References and Attachments

Please attach any citations, references, and your administrative letter(s) of support, etc. Letters of support must be provided from the sponsoring area (unit, office, department, school, library, campus office of the Vice President for Academic Affairs, etc.) that will be responsible for receipt and distribution of funding. In the case of multi-institutional affiliations, all participants’ institutions/departments must provide a letter of support.

We recommend reaching out to your sponsoring area as soon as possible to obtain this letter of support. A sample letter will be provided to you.