Apply now for funding to create free educational resources
UM Libraries provides grants and support to create, adapt, adopt OER
UM Libraries is providing funding to help faculty, instructors, and librarians create, adapt, and/or adopt an open educational resource (OER).
Advance Open Ed, a two-year initiative to build capacity and awareness of OERs at UM, provided funding for the creation of 21 OER projects. As a result of this success and UM’s ongoing commitment to open education, the Libraries is now offering ongoing support and funding for OER.
Applications are being accepted for grants up to $10,000. The deadline to apply is August 15, 2025.
Funding application and guidelines
Funding makes management textbook free online
Professor Bruno Dyck in the Department of Business Administration saw the Libraries OER funding as an opportunity to create a new edition of a management textbook first published in print and as an e-book and sold to students around the world.
Dyck only applied for the funding after talking with colleagues at UM and other schools who agreed that OER was a good thing. In previous years he and his colleagues had strongly discouraged him from publishing a no-cost book, telling him that such a book would not be valued. However, as Dyck says, “times have changed.”
Management: Financial, Social, and Ecological Well-Being was written by a team of seven international co-authors, several of whom said they would not have joined as co-authors had the book not been an OER. A unique feature of the book is that each chapter offers three approaches to management: Financial Bottom Line (FBL), Triple Bottom Line (TBL), and Social and Ecological Thought (SET). Research has shown that this increases students’ critical and ethical thinking, and makes them less materialistic and less individualistic.
Relationship between financial, ecological, and social realms under the three management approaches: Financial Bottom Line (FBL), Triple Bottom Line (TBL), and Social and Ecological Thought (SET).
The textbook is used in introductory management courses at the Asper School of Business and other universities and colleges. It has been endorsed by leading scholars in the field and is designed for use internationally. Currently, the OER is being peer-reviewed and piloted by students in the Philippines and British Columbia.
This OER textbook covers all the core material found in conventional management textbooks, plus it offers some new learning features that are possible with OER, including interactive test-prepper questions throughout the text and integrated whiteboard animation videos in each chapter.
More OER support
Tools, platforms and support provided by UM Libraries include:
- Pressbooks – book/document production and sharing application.
- eScholarship – open digital multimedia publishing platform for the UM community.
- Open Journal Systems – open-access journals.
- MSpace – UM’s institutional repository for preserving and providing open access to the scholarly works of University faculty and students.
- Article processing cost discounts for gold open access journal titles.
- Expert subject librarians who can help you navigate the OER field.
Learn about open educational resources
Contact UM Libraries for more information or with any questions.