TIE, a grant program?

Last week I came up with the idea of making TIE into a grant program. There are several reasons for this:

1. It will, hopefully, help up identify distance faculty that are interested and/or are doing something innovative but have managed to avoid detection by the ID's
2. It will have a more direct impact on their tenure and promotion since it will show up in their packets as a grant.
3. I am always impressed with the creativity and imagination of faculty and this would allow them to propose their own project, some of which I'm sure will be something none of us have imagined.
4. It will give clear requirements of program reports etc.

I'm sure there are others but these are all that come to mind at the moment.

I talked to Jane, who has done TONS of these small grants, and got a lot of great ideas and some questions we need to consider. Here is a list in no particular order:

1. Are past TIE participants eligible for the new grants? Maybe we should require presentation or publication from returning faculty?
2. We need a solid beginning and ending date.
3. State how faculty can spend the money
4. Ask faculty to propose how they want to spend the money
5. Have a review panel that includes OCP as well as a couple of faculty members
6. Should we encourage collaboration between faculty and/or disciplines?
7. Require and  end of the project report
8. Create a reviewer rubric for choosing the projects
9. Have a session at e-volution that will help them craft a possible grant proposal
10. Plan to go for maybe 3 years as is and then re-evaluate the effectiveness and whether things need to be changed.
11. Require participation in the Fall 2011 e-volution

We are thinking of sending out the call for proposals the second week of classes, advertising it and having a session at e-volution and then have the due date about 1 week later. We would do several meetings in the fall semester to get faculty oriented and then faculty would be required to teach and complete their project in either Spring, Summer or Fall of 2011.

I'm excited about this idea and I think it will help to turn TIE into standard operating procedure. It will also give some structure to it and to me!