Purdue Libraries News

The Provost’s Office is launching a new grant program to encourage faculty teams to plan sustainable, innovative instructional offerings during the summer term that will further the University’s Strategic Plan goal of Launching Tomorrow’s Leaders. Grant activities will span the period from summer 2011 to summer 2012, with planning occurring early in the cycle and implementation expected in summer 2012.

Interdisciplinary, collaborative, integrated, multiple course efforts are highly encouraged and preference will be given to programmatic efforts that provide up to 9 related credits. Fully on-campus programs (less than 20% of course delivery online) and hybrid programs (defined as classes with 20 – 80% of course delivery online) programs will be considered. For faculty interested in developing online courses, funding is available through Extended Campus.

Goals of the Provost’s Summer Instructional Innovation Program are listed below. Proposals can target undergraduate or graduate students and must address at least two of the five goals.

• Increase student participation in summer programs
• Reach new students through innovative summer programs
• Increase student success and progress toward graduation
• Encourage experimentation with experiential learning methods
• Increase utilization of physical facilities in the summer months

We anticipate awarding 5 – 10 planning grants in the $10,000-$30,000 range. Funds can be requested for building partnerships (e.g. with externship sites), recruiting and marketing, instructional supplies, graduate assistants, and other reasonable expenses of planning new instructional offerings. Funding for summer 2011 will be via the planning grant; additional funds will be made available for summer 2012 to
cover actual instructional costs. It is anticipated that an incentive will be provided based on student enrollments. A financial model will be developed during the academic year based on outcomes of the planning grants.

A two to three page summary of proposed projects for the 2011-12 Summer Instructional Innovation Program should be submitted to the Vice Provost’s Office by April 28, 2011 and include the following information:

• Project Title
• Names, affiliations, and contact information for program proposers
• Project description including a discussion of how the program addresses the grant goals and furthers the university strategic goal of launching tomorrow’s leaders
• Description of proposed summer 2012 course offerings with staffing plan
• Plan for assessing learning outcomes, documenting program impact, and sustaining the effort after the grant period
• Appendices
o Letters of support from relevant Department Heads, Deans, and External Partners

o Detailed two summer budget with budget justification

x Summer 2011 – Planning Budget ($20,000 – $30,000)
x Summer 2012 – Estimated Instructional Costs

Additional Resources

For assistant with the budget, please work with your business office.
Should your proposal target international students, please contact Office of International Programs for guidance.

CFP: http://www.openannotation.org/documents/openAnnotationRFP.pdf

Letter of Intent: 4/26/2011

Proposal: 5/17/2011

Awards: Up to 4 projects, $30,00-$45,000 each

The Open Annotation Collaboration (OAC) project is pleased to announce a Request For Proposal to collaborate with OAC researchers for building implementations of the OAC data model and ontology. The OAC is seeking to collaborate with scholars and/or librarians currently using and/or curating established repositories of scholarly digital resources with well-defined audiences of scholars. The OAC intends to fund a set of four projects that are complementary in content media type and use cases that leverage the OAC Data Model to the fullest extent, and that leverage existing annotation tools or at least have articulated an interesting scholarly annotation use case.

Two of the successful Respondents will collaborate with OAC researchers at the University of Maryland and the other two will collaborate with OAC research at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. (For these collaborations, Illinois and Maryland will provide guidance on the implementation of the OAC data model and ontology, help in defining extensions of the data model that might be necessary, advice on existing tools that might be adaptable for the demonstration experiment, feedback on correctness of mappings from/to native annotation formats and/or annotations created.)

Institute of Education Sciences, US Department of Education

CFP: http://ies.ed.gov/funding/unsolicited.asp

IES acceptance of unsolicited proposals:

The Institute of Education Sciences announces its interest in considering unsolicited applications for research, evaluation, statistics, and knowledge utilization projects that would make significant contributions to the mission of the Institute. The Institute’s mission is to conduct and support rigorous education statistics, research, and evaluation in order to provide reliable information about the condition of education, education practices that improve academic achievement, and the effectiveness of federal and other education programs, policies and practices. Unsolicited applications are defined as those that are not eligible for funding under the Institute’s FY 2011 grant competitions. You may be eligible to apply for a NCER or NCSER research program grant, so please check our Funding Opportunities page before submitting a research application to the unsolicited grants competition.

Note: regular funding programs and grant competitions can be found, http://ies.ed.gov/funding/

CFP: http://www.diggingintodata.org/

Deadline: June 16, 2011

Description: The idea behind the Digging into Data Challenge is to address how “big data” changes the research landscape for the humanities and social sciences. Now that we have massive databases of materials used by scholars in the humanities and social sciences — ranging from digitized books, newspapers, and music to transactional data like web searches, sensor data or cell phone records — what new, computationally-based research methods might we apply? As the world becomes increasingly digital, new techniques will be needed to search, analyze, and understand these everyday materials. Digging into Data challenges the research community to help create the new research infrastructure for 21st century scholarship.

Applicants will form international teams from at least two of the participating countries. Winning teams will receive grants from two or more of the funding agencies and, two years later, will be invited to show off their work at a special conference sponsored by the eight funders.

Award: For Canadian teams, the award amount will range between CAN $25,000 and $125,000. For UK teams, the award amount will range between GBP ₤15,000 and ₤100,000. If the UK team consists of two or more institutions, the maximum award is increased to ₤150,000. For US teams, the award amount will range between US $25,000 and $125,000. If the US team consists of two or more institutions, the maximum award is increased to $175,000. For Dutch teams, the award amount will range between EUR €17,000 and €100,000.

CFP: http://www.davisfoundations.org/site/educational.asp

Deadline: March 15, May 15, and October 1, 2011

The foundation’s objectives in making grants are to assist institutions in supporting more effective teaching and learning and/or controlling costs. Examples of funded projects that achieve these objectives include:

• Projects that improve the curriculum, the learning environment, assessment of undergraduate learning outcomes, faculty development, incentive systems, and administrative structures.
• Collaborative efforts among colleges and universities to reduce costs and improve learning.
• Studies and planning efforts central to the foundation’s concerns and interests.
• Preference is given to projects aimed at strengthening the general education core of the undergraduate experience.

CFP: http://www.nifa.usda.gov/funding/rfas/afri.html

Awards: varied

The Agriculture and Food Research Initiative (AFRI) at the National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) is charged with funding research, education, and extension grants and integrated research, extension, and education grants that address key problems of National, regional, and multi-state importance in sustaining all components of agriculture, including farm efficiency and profitability, ranching, renewable energy, forestry (both urban and agroforestry), aquaculture, rural communities and entrepreneurship, human nutrition, food safety, biotechnology, and conventional breeding. Providing this support requires that AFRI advances fundamental sciences in support of agriculture and coordinates opportunities to build on these discoveries. This will necessitate efforts in education and extension that deliver science-based knowledge to people, allowing them to make informed practical decisions.

Section 7406 of the Food, Conservation, and Energy Act of 2008 (Pub. L. 110-246) (i.e., the 2008 Farm Bill) amends subsection (b) of the Competitive, Special, and Facilities Research Grant Act (7 U.S.C. 450i(b)) to authorize the Secretary of Agriculture to establish a new competitive grant program to provide funding for fundamental and applied research, extension, and education to address food and agricultural sciences.  AFRI supersedes the National Research Initiative. AFRI Grants shall be awarded to address priorities in United States agriculture in the following areas:

A) Plant health and production and plant products;
B) Animal health and production and animal products;
C) Food safety, nutrition, and health;
D) Renewable energy, natural resources, and environment;
E) Agriculture systems and technology; and
F) Agriculture economics and rural communities.

CFP: http://www.nsf.gov/funding/pgm_summ.jsp?pims_id=5505

Deadline: October 10, 2011

Award: Up to $150,000 per project from $5M total funding

The Geoscience Education (GeoEd) Program is part of a portfolio of programs within the Directorate for Geosciences (GEO) that seeks to increase public understanding of Earth system science and foster recruitment, training and retention of a diverse and skilled geoscience workforce for the future.  The program achieves these goals by supporting innovative or transformative projects that improve the quality and effectiveness of formal and informal geoscience education at all educational levels, increase the number of students pursuing geoscience education and career paths, broaden participation of traditionally underrepresented groups in the geosciences, and promote public engagement in Earth system science.

In FY 2010 and FY 2012, the GeoEd program invites proposals in four main areas:

• advancing public Earth system science literacy, particularly through strengthening geoscience education in grades K-14 and informal education settings;
• fostering development and training of the diverse scientific and technical workforce required for 21st century geoscience careers;
• utilizing modern technologies to facilitate and increase access to geoscience education and/or develop innovative approaches for using geoscience research activities and data for educational purposes; and,
• establishing regional networks and alliances that bring together scientists, formal and informal science educators, as well as other stakeholders, in support of improving Earth system science education and broadening participation in the geosciences.

CFP: http://nciia.org/grants/courseandprogram

Deadline: May 6, 2011

Awards: $2,000 to $50,000 for 1-3 year projects

Course and Program grants are awarded to institutions to strengthen existing curricular programs or build new courses and programs in invention, innovation, and technology entrepreneurship, with an increasing emphasis on environmental and social entrepreneurship. Successful proposals present creative pedagogical approaches that generate and deploy student E-Teams, bringing real-life applications into the classroom setting and beyond.

An E-Team is a multidisciplinary group of faculty, students, and industry mentors working together to bring a product or technology to market.  The “E” stands for excellence and entrepreneurship.

CFP: http://www.onr.navy.mil/~/media/Files/Funding-Announcements/Special-Notice/11-SN-0004.ashx

Deadline: March 29, 2011

Funding: 8-10 awards, $300,000-$750,000 each

The primary purpose of the Data-to-Decision (D2D) Program is to develop a capability to rapidly develop, evaluate, and field prototype Decision Support Systems. To accomplish this goal, the D2D program has identified the creation of a library of flexible modules that can be easily repurposed, or modified, to meet the needs of many National Security applications as a critical need. This library will form an open architecture basis for the rapid development of new prototype decision support systems. Additionally, the architecture should allow these modules to be rapidly reconfigured, should be sufficiently flexible to enable easy upgrades of existing modules and should allow insertion of new or alternative modules created by innovative organizations. To help focus on the development of these broadly applicable modules, the program will be conducted using a series of cross-service challenge problems centered on specific sensing modalities. Data will be provided at the unclassified level, to ensure all innovative ideas can be captured, and at the operational level to make sure the solutions work with real data development that will generally occur through open consortiums delivering specific capabilities in contrast to a program in which the offeror has unique measures of success and operates independently. The system will be built on an open-architecture testbed running a Service Oriented Architecture with distributed nodes. The testbed will be built, owned and operated by a government team and will be used to perform research and module development in advanced user interfaces, analytics and data management. The testbed itself will consist of 100+ high performance nodes on a 10 GB Ethernet backbone. Between 0.5-1.0 petabyte of storage will be provided, and there will be a mix of different memory types to support research in storage architectures and efficient data access and retrieval. The system will be fully partitionable and reconfigurable to support research in grid vs. cloud architectures, algorithm scalability, data indexing, common data representation and other modules as identified or needed. Details regarding the Application Program Interfaces (API’s) and hardware will be supplied to offerors that have been selected for an award ONR, on behalf of DDR&E, plans to fund eight (8) to ten (10) individual awards with a value of $300,000 to $750,000 per year. However, lower and higher cost proposals will be considered. The Research and Development (R&D) efforts to be funded consist of Applied Research.

CFP: http://www.neh.gov/grants/guidelines/digitalhumanitiesstartup.html
Deadline: February 23, 2011
Level I Award: $5,000-$25,000
Level II Awards: $25,000-$50,000

The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) invites applications to the Digital Humanities Start-Up Grants program. This program is designed to encourage innovations in the digital humanities. By awarding relatively small grants to support the planning stages, NEH aims to encourage the development of innovative projects that promise to benefit the humanities.
Proposals should be for the planning or initial stages of digital initiatives in any area of the humanities. Digital Humanities Start-Up Grants may involve

* research that brings new approaches or documents best practices in the study of the digital humanities;
* planning and developing prototypes of new digital tools for preserving, analyzing, and making accessible digital resources, including libraries’ and museums’ digital assets;
* scholarship or studies that examine the philosophical or practical implications and impact of the use of emerging technologies in specific fields or disciplines of the humanities, or in interdisciplinary collaborations involving several fields or disciplines;
* innovative uses of technology for public programming and education utilizing both traditional and new media; and
* new digital modes of publication that facilitate the dissemination of humanities scholarship in advanced academic as well as informal or formal educational settings at all academic levels.