After publication
Congratulations on publishing your OER! The hard work is completed but your resource will need some maintenance post publication to ensure accuracy and relevance. Post publication actions can include:
- Exploring the analytics on usage
- Collecting and incorporating feedback
- Maintaining, updating and improving the OER
- Assessing impact, value and reach
- Considering research and career opportunities
Data analysis
Developing strategies and approaches to measuring the success of your OER project should be developed during the Project Plan stages. Collecting and analysing this data will help you maintain accountability to the goals of your project and to understand whether your project is successful. Measuring success will depend on a few factors:
- What constitutes success for your project and how will it be measured? Pedagogical innovation? Surveys? Interviews? Student feedback?
- Who do you need to report to about the open text project? Funders? Your institution? Department?
- What data is needed to indicate “success”? Adoption numbers? Students impacted?
- How do you need to use the data for your own portfolio? Tenure and promotion? Merit?
Working through these questions will assist you in collecting the right metrics to report fully about the success of your project. This guide outlines the kinds of data that you can collect to frame discussions about your open textbook project and ensure you have reached your goals.
Types of data
There are different types of data available for OER evaluation and usage:
- Adoption data - Collecting adoption data can be a difficult process as it requires adopters to identify that they are using the OER in their courses or instructional practices. Developing a feedback mechanism for your OER that requests that adopters identify their use of the OER is the easiest way to gather this data - this could be a request to email you if they are using the resource or an online form to advise of usage.
- Repository data - Depending on where you decide to host your OER you may be able to take advantage of the platform to gather analytics about your OER's use. The data you can collect includes views (by year/month), downloads (by year/month), and user ratings and comments. While there may be many data options for you, you need to decide how you will use it and select what is most useful to your success measures.
- Pressbooks or Figshare data - If you have used Pressbooks to publish your OER and are an administrator of the OER, you have the ability to view statistics through the Pressbooks platform. Data includes number of visitors, number of page views and referrer URLs. Figshare shows page views and download data.
- Evaluation Metrics - While usage and adoption statistics provide part of the story of your OER’s success, understanding the impact on students beyond cost savings can provide broader insights on the value of tailoring an OER for pedagogical purposes. Unit evaluation data can include a rise in grades, less student withdrawals, increased engagement as well as qualitative feedback.
Maintain and update your OER
Key to ongoing usage and relevance of an OER is to maintain currency and quality. Once you have published your OER, your focus should shift from creation to:
- Maintenance
- Updates and revisions
- Errata or corrections
- Planning and coordinating future versions and editions
Note
If your OER is a book and has an ISBN, care needs to be taken when maintaining or updating the text. An ISBN refers to a particular version of a book and changes require a new edition to be produced. Minor alterations such as spelling corrections are acceptable but additional or removed chapter/s would require a new ISBN.
Maintaining your OER
Changes to your OER after release should be planned out in advance and scheduled for different times of the year, depending on their scope. For example:
- Maintenance changes – small ongoing changes that are more about function than content (e.g. fixing typos and broken links) can be completed at any time and are the only type of revisions you should make during semester
- Major updates – adding or replacing sections of content or the OER book itself in the middle of a semester can disrupt learning and teaching so you should plan these for breaks between teaching periods
Developing a maintenance schedule for your OER can help you:
- Build ongoing maintenance into your project timeline
- Track, assign and complete routine maintenance tasks
- Plan the release of new versions and editions
The maintenance schedule for your OER should include a process and timetable for all the tasks you’ll need to complete to keep your OER relevant and current, including:
- Responding to, reviewing and incorporating feedback
- Checking and fixing links and embedded multimedia
- Correcting errors
- Adding minor updates to keep the content current
- Creating new editions
Improvements, additions and ancillary content
Improvements and additions are significant, scheduled changes to content. These may include:
- Elements (e.g. ancillaries) that were planned but didn’t make it into the first release
- Suggestions from reviewers
- Proposals from adopters
- Ideas you or your authoring or publishing team came up with after release
- Disciplinary or thematic updates
- Adding content such as interactive exercises
Revisions
Many authors are already thinking about the next edition of their OER before the first edition is published. They realize that their OER is a snapshot of information and that this information will continue to evolve after the OER is published, so they plan for the next edition immediately. (Remember: Writing an OER, it will never feel finished. There is always something that can be changed, improved, or added. At some point you will need to stop and say “good enough.”)
Ancillary materials
One of the most common post-release additions to OER are ancillary materials. Ancillaries can supplement your OER content and make it more appealing to adopters. Lack of ancillary materials is one of the most frequently cited reasons instructors decide not to adopt an OER. Ancillaries can be:
- Question banks
- Problem sets and solutions
- Slide decks
- Student workbooks
- Other instructor materials
Attributions
Text adapted from:
- Evaluate and maintain section in Open Publishing Guide for Authors University of Southern Queensland Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted
- Open Educational Resources Collective Workflow by Council of Australians University Librarians CC BY 4.0
- Self-Publishing Guide by Lauri M. Aesoph is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted