2022 Blended and Online Learning Design (BOLD) Graduate Fellowship Program

The Blended and Online Learning Design (BOLD) Graduate Fellowship Program is an open education initiative supported and funded by the Provost Funds for Excellence in Graduate Studies. The program aims at enabling and empowering graduate students to become knowledge producers through designing, developing, and contributing open educational resources (OER) for blended and online learning.

All graduate students at Georgia Tech are eligible to apply for the BOLD graduate fellowship. The BOLD Fellows receive a stipend of $2,000. No tuition waiver will be provided. The program is not intended to replace graduate students’ regular funding so employed graduate students can apply.

The program will start on January 18, 2022, and end on June 17, 2022. Fellows will commit to working on an OER project of their interest for about 4 hours per week. Virtual meeting with the cohort and the program advisors once every other week is required.

The application for the 2022 BOLD Graduate Fellowship is due on December 31, 2021.

The goal of your project is to create an open educational resource that can be used in a blended or an online course. You can choose any topic from an undergraduate or a graduate course, but we encourage you to select a course that you are familiar with and a course topic that is generally challenging to students who take the course. The project output could be a piece of software, an instructional video, an online learning module, a game, or a website. You can choose any of these formats, but keep in mind that the objective of the project is to help students better learn the course topic.

You may take a look at the projects developed by the BOLD fellows in 2021 to get some ideas and get inspired.

To apply for the 2022 BOLD graduate fellowship, please fill out and submit an online application form by December 31, 2021. Please note that you will be asked to provide a link to your online CV/resume. We suggest you prepare it before you start your application.

Yes, you can apply even if you do not have a project in mind. We will solicit sponsored projects among faculty and we will try to match you with a project that fits your interests, knowledge, and skills. However, a perfect match is not guaranteed. We encourage you to contact the instructors of some courses you have taken for project ideas. They may wish to create learning materials but may not have the time to do it by themselves. In this case, they may be happy to collaborate with you on a project.

  1. Attending cohort meetings: All BOLD Graduate Fellows are required to meet virtually with the cohorts and the program advisors once every other week – You will not work on your project alone. We hope to form a learning community and you will be a contributing member of the community.
  2. Working 4 hours/ week on a project: Fellows are expected to work about 4 hours per week from January 18, 2022, to June 17, 2022, on their selected project. Based on the experiences of the previous cohort, some fellows actually spent more time on their projects, depending on the scale of the projects and how enthusiastic they were about their projects.
  3. Developing a project portfolio: Fellows are required to create a project portfolio to document their work progress. This helps you manage your time and keep you stay on track!
  4. Providing peer feedback: Fellows are expected to provide feedback on other fellows’ projects –  providing and receiving peer feedback are excellent opportunities to help everybody learn from each other!
  5. Delivering and presenting a project: Fellows are also required to submit a project deliverable, a reflection paper on their experience as a BOLD fellow, and present the project to the cohort at the end of the semester – you will be very proud of what you have accomplished then!

Please send an email to Chaohua Ou with your inquiry.