Overview
The UCF AIM High event presents four AIM High Impact Awards: two that recognize an individual faculty member and two that recognize a department or group. These will be divided into the ‘Legacy‘ category, for those who have been using affordable instructional materials for two or more years, and the ‘Rising‘ category, for those who have adopted affordable instructional materials within the last two years. The winners of these awards are those who have made significant impacts and commendable effort towards providing affordable instructional materials for students. The award guidelines have been created to be inclusive in nature to equally recognize faculty from across the university who teach various levels and class sizes.
- Individual Impact Award (Rising)
- Individual Impact Award (Legacy)
- Group Impact Award (Rising)
- Group Impact Award (Legacy)
Submission Criteria
The following criteria will be considered for the award recipients to determine the impact the individual(s) had on affordable instructional materials at UCF. The submissions will be considered holistically – not based purely on data – to determine overall impact.
The 2025 call for nominations is now closed.
- Impact in Using Affordable Instructional Materials
- Adoption of free textbooks/content (e.g., library eBook, open textbook, OER) OR affordable by design, e.g., self-created module content, lecture content, and other free or low-cost materials.
- Length of time using these affordable instructional materials (legacy award vs rising award)
- Number of course sections impacted
- Average/Estimate of cost savings
- Student Success in Using Affordable Instructional Materials
- Student feedback (rich qualitative feedback based on their experience interacting with affordable materials, e.g., SPI data, student survey results, student quotes)
- Student success data, e.g., DFW rates, GPA, student enrollment, and any other success metrics (Optional but encouraged)
- Creativity and Innovation in Using Affordable Instructional Materials
- Integration of materials to enhance learning
- Creation of free textbooks/content (e.g., library eBook, open textbook, OER)
- Received grant(s) that led to purchasing course materials and/or doing redesign to meet AIM objectives
- Use of external online tools for course content (e.g., social media, blogs, websites, wikis, apps etc.)
- Use of UCF resources (Obojobo, Materia, Pressbooks, Leganto, and other Canvas features)
- Level of interactivity
- Uniqueness of materials.
- Student centric and contextualized materials.
- Sharing and Collaboration in Using Affordable Instructional Materials
- Involvement in case study, research project, presentation, conference proceeding, publication, sharing of content or resources with others (internally and externally), etc.
- Content created meets the specifications of the UCF digital accessibility guidelines.
- Partners with others (i.e. instructional designers, librarians, UCF colleagues, UCF staff, external colleagues)
- Capture specifics of partnership: communication, co-author, etc.
Resources
When the call for nominations has opened, resources will be posted below to serve as brief examples to help prompt ideas for your submission that you can expand upon. If you have any questions regarding your nomination, please reach out to us at affordable@ucf.edu.
Please note:
- For this event, only those who have taught classes in the past year are eligible for these awards. Spring 2024, Summer 2024, and Fall 2024.
- We understand that you may not have all the information for the data-related questions. Please provide the information to the best of your ability or an estimate for these numbers.
- Your course(s) may be eligible for Affordability Counts if your course materials are less than or equal to $20 per credit hour. While we highly recommend submitting your course(s) if they are eligible, it is not required to submit to Affordability Counts in order to be considered for this award.
- You can view past Impact Award winners on the AIM website.
Next Steps
After you have submitted your individual or group self-nomination, you will receive an automatic notification from Qualtrics. At that time, the review committee will compile all of the submissions until the deadline. A member from the review committee will reach out to you and/or your nominee if there are any follow-up questions.
The 2025 call for nominations is now closed. For any questions, please contact us at affordable@ucf.edu.