The Council on Academic Affairs approved a course in Grant Writing for Organizations at its meeting Thursday.

The course would be housed in the organizational and professional development program.

Bruce Barnard, an instructor in the school of technology, said the course is specific to the competencies of grant and proposal writing.

Students in professional development careers as teachers or professionals may very well end up writing grants, Barnard said.

The course emphasizes developing a thoughtful program or response and using that to build a proposal or address a professional development issue rather than attempting to solicit funds, he said.

According to the course proposal, practitioners need to be able to develop new program initiatives, articulate the purpose and structure of these initiatives, identify goals and objectives, outline program requirements, propose a reasonable budget and develop an evaluation process.

The students will create a model grant solicitation in sections and write a needs assessment, program plan and evaluation section. These will be met with feedback and students will submit their final project.

Barnard said he wants the class to focus more on the idea of developing a concept and finding a particular funding source as opposed to an overview of nonprofit organizations.

“It’s very specific to writing grants,” he said.

Barnard said the class can be online, face-to-face or a hybrid of both.

He suspects it will initially be offered online, as many students in the OPD program are non-traditional students who work, have families or take classes online for other reasons.

27 items were added to the agenda to be voted on in upcoming meetings. These include revising the psychology major and adding a new engineering technology major, as well as courses on carpentry and engineering.

Cassie Buchman can be reached at 581-2812 or cjbuchman@eiu.edu.