Every project starts somewhere. In research, especially when new pursuits require you to venture beyond your typical domain, startup costs can be high. You want to explore a new dataset but you don’t have bandwidth to dig into it; you have an experiment you’ve always wanted to run in your classroom, but no funds to buy materials; you have this hypothesis but need to use a different methodological approach to explore it than you typically use. There are so many ways that great research projects wind up sitting in the hopper for far too long.

With these challenges in mind, the Office of Academic Innovation is committing funds to support a triannual series of Quick Win Research Grants. This seed funding is intended to enable research projects on special topics in higher education and academic innovation to get the support they need to get off the ground. We’ve organized the call into three tracks, in order to support resource sharing among grantees and to allow for thematic presentations of findings.

For the inaugural year, the topics we’re seeking projects to fund are:

• Diversity, equity, and inclusion in learning environments

• Supporting communities in informal and/or formal learning environments

• Hybrid learning

We very much look forward to considering new tracks in the future and welcome suggestions. Proposals will be reviewed three times a year, on January 15, June 15, and September 15. Typically funding is capped at $5000. We hope that projects that are at later stage and require larger amounts of support will consider applying to our Academic Innovation Fund.

Interested in applying? You can find the application here: http://ai.umich.edu/quick-wins-research-grants/

Have questions? Don’t hesitate to reach out to Cait Holman ([email protected]) for more information!