Reimagining Higher Education Grants

Quick Summary Upfront

Thanks to a generous bequest, funding is available for individual Senate faculty (up to $60,000), academic units (up to $125,000 per project), or consortia of academic units (up to $200,000 per project) to reimagine how UC Berkeley can best continue to ensure broad access to an excellent education in light of technological, societal, and funding changes. These funds will be allocated via a competitive process. Applications for the first round of grants are due October 1, 2025.

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First round of grant submissions are due October 1, 2025

FAQs

Background

Access to an excellent education is central to UC Berkeley’s mission. Universities, after all, exist to educate. Inspired by Berkeley’s commitment to providing a world-class education, a donor provided a generous bequest that, inter alia, provides slightly more than $4 million for the purpose of helping us to reimagine what access to excellence means in the 21st Century. Because such a reimagining cannot be top-down, we have elected to use this bequest to fund pilot projects that will help to ensure Berkeley continues to provide access to an excellent undergraduate education in a rapidly changing world. Individual faculty, academic units, and broader campus collaborations are all eligible to apply.

The world of higher education is changing. For example, advances in various technologies, including widespread availability and industry adoption of AI, offer both opportunities and challenges. Technology can help us improve access, allow for deeper understanding, and speed time to degree completion. It can also create issues around academic integrity, the learning process, and the shape of the job market into which most of our students will head. We also see change in funding for higher education: For the foreseeable future, resources can be forecast to grow at a lesser rate than our historic growth in costs, which threatens our ability to provide access unless we can determine ways to enhance our productivity. There are social changes: Many in society currently question the value of a traditional undergraduate education, both with regard to what is taught and how it sets our students up for success later in life. In short, we are at a moment in time in which it is critical that we reexamine and reimagine both what excellence means and how we will provide access to it.

As a consequence, the campus invites individual faculty members, academic units, or consortia of units to propose innovative and transformative pilot projects. Projects may focus on improving assessment, classroom instruction, discovery experiences, experiential learning, student preparation, job readiness, or on expanding our capacity to provide mentoring and other academic support to students outside the classroom. Projects may be at the course level, the level of an academic unit’s overall curriculum, or at a broader campus level (e.g., enhancing curricular complementarities across units). A condition of participation is that grant recipients commit to help disseminate the results of the funded projects: proposals must detail how they will do so.

Proposal Details

Individual Courses Proposals

For proposals pertaining to individual courses, proposers  should indicate how they anticipate the project will achieve one or more of the following objectives:

  • Increase the integration of interactive and collaborative technology-enhanced learning experiences into courses and/or curriculum;

  • Allow for the redesign of courses to incorporate a mixture of automated low-stakes assessments for appropriate assignments while creating opportunities for students to receive frequent peer-to-peer feedback on learning to maintain human connection within the classroom community;

  • Increase the integration of authentic assessments in order to maximize the impact of instructors’ engagement with student work;

  • Provide greater experiential learning or discovery opportunities by, for instance, increasing the number of project-based assignments and/or research-based assignments per semester;

  • Improve students’ readiness for future study and/or to enter the workforce by, for instance, integrating professional portfolios and/or capstone experiences into a single course or sequence of courses;

  • Improve access to the course (i.e., promote or allow for larger enrollment) with a less-than-proportional increase in resources (a proposal, e.g., that offers to double enrollment if TAS is doubled is unlikely to be seen as compelling); and/or

  • Help ensure access to the course by reducing the cost of offering the course or slowing the rate of increase in the cost of offering the course vis-à-vis current trend.

With regard to the last two bullets: the objective is to consider ways of redesigning/reimagining a course that allow us to maintain the course’s quality, while being responsible stewards of our limited resources. Keep in mind that a goal of this grant program is to devise improvements that can be promulgated broadly; hence, especially for courses that directly reach a limited number of students, it will be important to provide, in the proposal, a strategy for how the innovations and improvements developed can be promulgated widely. Keep in mind that a goal of this grant program is to arrive at innovations that will be long lasting; hence, a critical part of any proposal will be how the innovations can be sustained once the grant funds have been expended. Note: proposals should not be submitted for improvements for courses in self-supporting degree programs (SSGPDPs).

Some specific means of achieving the above objectives could include:

  • Developing instructional materials to provide structured learning opportunities and/or assessments to support the needs of a range of student learners;

  • Incorporating GenAI into instructional materials, and aligning that incorporation with modified student learning outcomes that reflect GenAI’s influence;

  • Integrating peer-to-peer learning that effectively account for differentiated student experience;

  • Creating a supportive and encouraging community that fosters student inclusion and belonging;

  • Revising the curriculum to expand the breadth of views and perspectives being represented; 

  • Incorporating assessments that promote equitable outcomes, and that reduce known systemic inequities in who performs well and succeeds;

  • Collaborating and coordinating with instructional teams across departments and schools to share teaching approaches; or

  • Developing connections between students and instructors to empower students to see themselves as practitioners in the discipline and/or profession.

Academic Units  | Multi-Unit Proposals

For proposals at the level of academic units or that are collaborations across academic units, proposers should indicate how they anticipate the project will achieve one or more of the following objectives:

  • Increase the integration of interactive and collaborative technology-enhanced learning experiences across the unit’s (consortia’s) curriculum;

  • Allow for the redesign of courses to incorporate a mixture of automated low-stakes assessments for appropriate assignments while creating and opportunities for students to receive frequent peer-to-peer feedback on learning to maintain human connection within the classroom community;

  • Increase the integration of authentic assessments in order to maximize the impact of instructors’ engagement with  student work;

  • Provide greater experiential learning or discovery opportunities by, for instance, increasing the number of project-based assignments and/or research-based assignments per semester;

  • Improve students’ readiness for future study and/or to enter the workforce by, for instance, integrating professional portfolios and/or capstone experiences across a sequence of courses;

  • Improve access to and success in gateway and other high-demand courses;

  • Streamline requirements for majors and minors, so as to enhance the experience for students by providing greater flexibility, more straightforward paths, and ensure timely degree completion; and/or

  • Ensure course offerings are complementary and not substitutes (i.e., reduce the number of courses with considerable overlap in material). Propose curricular modifications that create opportunities to better serve students utilizing less resources.

With regard to the last two bullets: the objective is to consider ways of redesigning/reimagining the curriculum that allow us to maintain quality programs that appropriately balance the need to provide students with depth and breadth of knowledge with our being responsible stewards of our limited resources. Keep in mind that a goal of this grant program is to devise improvements that can be promulgated broadly; hence, especially for majors/departments that directly reach a limited number of students, it will be important to provide, in the proposal, a strategy for how the innovations and improvements developed can be promulgated widely. Keep in mind that a goal of this grant program is to arrive at innovations that will be long lasting; hence, a critical part of any proposal is how the innovations will be sustained once the grant funds have been expended.

All Proposals 

All proposals should describe: 

  • how the requested funding would be used to advance our educational mission and improve the undergraduate experience;

  • the period the program will be run (note: end dates will normally be no more than one year from time of grant unless permission is given for a later end date);

  • what would constitute a successful program/pilot and how the proposers will evaluate their program/pilot;

  • how the proposers will help with campus adoption/implementation/maintenance of successful innovations;

  • how many students the pilot program will reach and the number that could potentially benefit if the program is scaled up; and

  • the likely budgetary implications if the pilot proves successful and is implemented in an ongoing fashion; of particular interest is how a successful program can aid the campus in dealing with its budgetary pressures.

  • how recipients will disseminate the lessons learned from their program broadly and what materials they will make available.

A condition of participation is that grant recipients commit to help disseminate the results of the funded projects. A possible means of dissemination is to work with the Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL) to make a written summary of their work available to be posted on the CTL website or other campus website(s) within 90 days of the end date of the grant. Another possible means is for grant recipients to provide at least one presentation to an appropriate audience, such as the Council of College Deans, if asked to do so. 

Prior to submitting a proposal, proposers are encouraged to explore the resources available at the Center for Teaching and Learning and, more broadly, with Research, Teaching, & Learning

Funding Levels and Tracks

Individual:

  • Projects that can be overseen and implemented by individual instructors.

  • Funding range: $25,000 to $60,000.

Academic Unit (eg. Department, School)

  • Projects for individual academic units covering multiple courses and/or the unit’s undergraduate curriculum.

  • Funding range: $50,000 to $125,000.

Multi-unit Consortia: 

  • Projects across multiple academic units covering multiple courses and/or the units’ undergraduate curricula.

  • Funding range: $75,000 to $200,000.

Note: multiple departments within a single decanal unit can form a multi-unit consortium.

Proposals with funding requests in excess of the caps set forth above, especially if multi-year, will be considered, but proposers are strongly encouraged to be in contact with the EVCP’s office (evcp@berkeley.edu) before submitting a proposal that requests funding in excess of the above caps.

Types of Expenses that May be Funded

Award funds may be used to:

  • Pay summer salary to faculty working on the projects during the summer;

  • Pay modest stipends (maximum $30,000 per project and maximum $15,000 per individual per year) to faculty overseeing departmental/school or multi-unit projects;

  • Hire Graduate Student Researchers (GSR benefits, including fee remission, when applicable, should be included in budgetary calculations) or undergraduate student workers;

  • Hire temporary staff to work on departmental/school or multi-unit projects;

  • Pay for project-related supplies and other expenses;

  • Pay for software, instruments, and equipment that (i) directly support the project and (ii) are not currently available on the campus or through campus-wide licensing agreements.

Award funds cannot be used to:

  • Cover expenses incurred prior to the grant being made; or

  • Fund the normal operations of an academic unit; or

  • Supplement or augment TAS funds; or 

  • Pay for course release.

Proposal Process

Proposals for the first round of funding should be submitted by October 1, 2025 using the online form

Each proposal should include the following information:

  • The name(s) of the principal investigator(s). A biography of no more than one page can be submitted for each PI.

  • A beginning and end date. Projects must commence within the 2025–26 academic (fiscal) year. Preference will be given to projects that will conclude prior to the start of the fall term 2026.

  • A narrative description of the pilot program that includes information that responds to the prompts and issues given above. This should be no more than six pages in length.

  • A requested amount of funding and an itemized budget to justify that request. The itemized budget should be accompanied by a brief narrative to explain the costs.

Funding decisions will be announced on a rolling basis, with all decisions expected to be made by October 31, 2025. 

Questions about the program, including allowable expenses, should be sent to evcp@berkeley.edu with Reimagining Higher Education Grants, in the subject line.