OER Grant Program Awards Nine Projects in 2026 Cycle

Congratulations to the recipients of the 2026 Open Educational Resources (OER) Grant! 

The OER Grant Program supports the adoption and creation of open educational resources for use in University of Kentucky courses. OER are class materials – including textbooks, assignments, podcasts, slides, videos, and more – that are free for anyone to use, share, or revise. 

The nine recipients of the 2026 cycle span a wide variety of disciplines with projects ranging from the adoption of existing OER materials to the creation of entirely new textbooks. When completed, all materials will be openly licensed and freely available to the public. 

Learn more about each of the grantees and their projects below:

• Valerio Caldesi Valeri, Classics: This project will create the first-semester instructional units of an open textbook for Biblical Greek. Designed for the new Biblical Greek subtitle in GRK 101, the resource will provide students with no-cost course materials that integrate guided reading, grammar support, and scaffolded practice while introducing them to authentic excerpts from both the Old and New Testament.
• Heather Campbell-Speltz, Hispanic Studies: This project involves first the adaptation and eventually the creation of OER for the Intermediate Spanish Conversation and Composition course that will facilitate the transition from the 4-semester language series to the content-focused SPA courses at the 300 and 400 levels. The course resulting from this project will be one of two foundational requirements for Spanish majors and minors in the proposed revisions of the Spanish undergraduate curriculum. Using Open Pedagogy approaches as the “guiding praxis” for curriculum development, students will play a crucial role in the collaborative selection, critique, adaptation, and creation of OER that will serve as no-cost primary course materials for the class in future semesters.
• Bradley Elliott, Mathematics: This project is a textbook for UK's Precalculus class: Algebra and Trigonometry for Calculus. The book will be organized in the same way as our course, and present the same solution methods, to avoid confusion that can happen when mixing and matching material from different books. The text will also allow for more depth into each topic, and more background/preparation material than we can cover in class.
• Brian Higgins and Chris Hughes, Microbiology, Immunology, and Molecular Genetics: This project will involve the creation of a concise, organ system–based open-access textbook focused on high-yield foundational topics in immunology and their integration into microbiology, pathophysiology, and clinical medicine. The book will be structured by organ systems and will emphasize clinically relevant conditions, focusing on those prevalent in both the United States and the Commonwealth of Kentucky. Each chapter will present essential immunologic concepts and explicitly connect them to disease mechanisms and clinical manifestations.
• Hayley Hoffman, Information Science: This project supports the development of a cohesive textbook for CIS 112: Accelerated Composition & Communication. It will combine the course’s three foci into one textbook: composition, communication, and service learning. Specifically, this project will update the two OERs currently used in the course (one for composition and one for communication) and combine them, as well as integrate a third section, written for this project, related to service learning. This textbook will be used by over 600 undergraduate students every academic year.
• Adam Kho, Educational Policy Studies & Evaluation: This project introduces curated open educational resources into an introductory statistics course in place of commercial textbooks. By selecting and adapting materials from multiple open sources, the project will create a more flexible, accessible, and course-aligned set of resources that improves student access, removes cost barriers, and provides materials students can continue to use beyond the course.
• Winter Phong, Arts Administration: Access Stewardship for Organizations in Conversation is a new open educational resource designed to inspire stronger, more thoughtful approaches to access in arts and cultural organizations. Developed for the course Access Stewardship for Organizations, the project brings together interdisciplinary perspectives on disability, accessibility, leadership, and organizational practice to offer a freely available resource for students, educators, and practitioners. Blending original written content with recorded conversations from experts across multiple areas of access, the resource invites ongoing learning, reflection, and action around building more inclusive and responsive organizations.
• Kristel Scoresby and Blake Conley, Social Work: This project develops an open-access AI resource guide to assist students with the reasoning skills required for diagnostic interviewing. Through prompt templates, reflection tools, and ethical guardrails, the guide positions AI as a learning scaffold to prepare students for responsible, critical use of AI in professional practice. 
• Leslie Sweeney and Blanca Munoz, Information Science: This project is to develop a cohesive and updated communication and composition textbook for the CIS 110/111 course sequence. More specifically, a book will be created to assemble relevant writing, visual communication, public speaking, and research related materials for instructors and students.

To learn more about the program or for support finding or creating OER, contact the Affordable Course Content Librarian at ACCLibrarian@l.uky.edu.