Last week, Talis Education launched an angel fund for open education, called the Talis Incubator for Open Education. Talis Education is providing funds up to “£15,000 to help individuals or small groups who have big ideas about furthering the cause of Open Education. All Talis asks in return is that the project deliverables are ‘open sourced’ and the intellectual property returned back to the community, allowing it to be used freely. Talis won’t, and never will, exert any rights to the intellectual property or ideas that are funded.” From their announcement:

“Potential projects that could be funded under the scheme include:

* Creation and publication of Open Education Resources for others to use
* Creation of a new (or extension of an existing) open source software tool allowing educators to author content
* Creation of datasets related to the field of Open Education – for example, you could curate or publish data relating to all open syllabi as linked open data
* Conducting a research study of how Open Assessment could be applied to a particular subject area and submitting this to a relevant conference
* Working towards the creation and adoption of open standards and frameworks that support the adoption of Open Education.

Talis believe the principals behind Open Education are going to have a big impact on how education is accessed, assessed and certified in the future. Therefore, by joining in conversation with others who share this view, and helping ideas develop, Talis can work towards a future where everyone can use the web to share, use, and reuse knowledge openly.”

The funds are awarded in two rounds, with the first deadline being the end of the year—December 31, 2009. To submit a proposal, see their guidelines, which may change prior to September.

Check out the Talis Education site itself, licensed CC BY.