Grassroots+ grant

Did you develop a promising ICT application through an education grant? Take the next step with Grassroots+. This grant helps you explore how your innovation can make an impact beyond your own course or programme. With a budget and educational guidance, you can further develop, test and implement your project on a broader scale. Build on your innovation and help it grow across the UvA with a Grassroots+ grant.

What are Grassroots+?

Grassroots+ is a small-scale, accessible grant designed for cross-disciplinary educational innovation that builds on previously developed educational tools with a proven impact on education.

In addition to a monetary award, this grant offers support for knowledge sharing and adoption, and a personalised teacher professional development programme.

UvA employees who have received a Grassroots and/or Responsible AI grant in the past three years will be personally invited to apply for Grassroots+.

Projects 2025-2026

Co-designing VibeSearch on UvA AI Chat - Gabriel Pereira & Steve Jankowski

Exploring how VibeSearch, an AI-supported literature search tool for students, can be scaled up and integrated into UvA AI Chat.

Gabriel Pereira & Steve Jankowski, Faculty of Humanities

Boosting confidence and fluency in L2-speaking through UvA AI Chat - Mylène Dobrijevic, Kimberley Mulder, Thom Westveer

This project uses UvA AI Chat to strengthen the speaking skills of students through additional, course‑related conversation practice.

Mylène Dobrijevic, Kimberley Mulder, Thom Westveer, Faculty of Humanities

Diversity within a uniform electronic learning environment (Canvas) - Sebastian van der Voort & Marieke Sijm

Developing and sharing a user‑friendly, UvA‑wide Canvas extension that lets lecturers without programming expertise design a more dynamic and inclusive digital learning environment.

Sebastian van der Voort & Marieke Sijm, Faculty of Medicine

Practical information

Criteria

We will use the following criteria when assessing and selecting applications:

  • Your idea builds on a previously completed grant project with demonstrable and promising results. These include: reducing lecturers’ workload; encouraging students to think more (inter)actively about the material or to apply it more (inter)actively; students applying their knowledge in innovative ways; and making it easier to provide more feedback to lecturers and/or students.
  • Your project is cross-disciplinary and has broader applicability within the UvA.
  • You are willing to explore literature on similar cases.
  • If you are applying as a student, a lecturer will be associated with the project.
  • You must convincingly demonstrate the feasibility of the grant project through a clear project proposal. This proposal clearly defines the activities, methods, schedule, budget, and potential risks.

Procedure

  • UvA employees who have received a Grassroots and/or Responsible AI grant in the past three years will be personally invited to apply for Grassroots+.
  • The application will be reviewed by a committee composed of experts from various faculties, assembled by TLC.
  • The results will be announced in mid-March.
  • If you are awarded a grant, you are expected to attend the Innovation Festival on Thursday 2 April from, 3 p.m. to 5 p.m where both new and existing grant holders pitch their plans or results to each other.
  • You will receive substantive and procedural support throughout your project.
  • During your final evaluation, content will be collected for a one-off blog post about your project.

More information

Esther van Schaik

For more information about the Grassroots+ grant, please contact project leader Esther van Schaik (Educational advisor TLC-EB and co-president Blended Learning community).

Email Esther