Key Links
- Review Guide Template [adopt and modify]
- Handout for session 9
- Session Chat
The ultimate purpose of review is to ensure that your OER is well-structured and ready to be used in the classroom. Review can help you get critical input and suggestions for change that will make your OER even stronger. By sharing your book with subject experts, you can ensure that the content is appropriate, accurate, and adequately covers the material. At heart, review is about bringing more hands on deck to invest in and help your resource.
Today’s session covered the different kinds of review, workflows for these processes, and important considerations for this stage of your projects. We looked at a few central documents and questions that may support you all. It helps no matter what stage of your project you are in to do a bit of forward thinking about how to share the results of this process!
1. Peer Review: ‘Peers’ can offer constructive feedback and solutions to improve the quality of educational content. We encourage you to reflect, recognize, and minimize biases in peer review. For instance, consider what types of feedback you need and who can speak to the quality of your content besides another instructor — would an industry expert be able to input? Think back to your SLOs — whose subject matter perspectives are needed to help determine whether the OER is built to help students achieve these outcomes?
2. Accessibility Review: The accessibility review involves a thorough run through the different output formats of your OER looking specifically at the web accessibility in each format. A specific set of accessibility criteria can guide the people in your team who are tasked with this form of review to ensure that your resource meets the desired accessibility standards. The goal is to make as accessible an OER as you can, knowing that there is always opportunity for improvement down the road.
3. Classroom Review: This form of review is particularly powerful because it invites feedback from the students which ultimately will help your team to determine necessary improvements for future iterations. Feedback can be gathered both from the instructor using the book to teach as well as from the students using the book to learn. Try to identify some academic and non-academic measures as you gather comments from the classroom. I know it may seem like an unconventional metric, but thinking about what your OER does to create a joyful learning environment can really help to improve your students’ experience.
We provided a Review Guide Template [link above] that will help you establish review workflows and identify expectations and central guiding questions to better structure your review process and support reviewers. The adoption activity is is laid out in more detail in the handout for session 9 [linked above].
In the final part of our session, we participants engaged in a discussion activity. If you missed our session, please consider adding your own answers to one or more of these questions as a reply below:
- How will your team attempt to manage the effects of bias in the review process?
- How will your team invite a more diverse range of reviews and value a broad range of perspectives?
- What non-traditional subject matter experts you’d like to work with? (students, community members, etc.)
- What project specific questions you would like to ask during the review process?
While the review stage is fairly straightforward, it’s critical to prepare all the documents and workflows ahead of time to ensure smooth sailing. And remember: along the way, if you have any questions, do not hesitate to lean on each other and the open community, including the Rebus forum, cohort members, and myself.
Next week, we’ll begin looking towards the book’s official launch with a session on formatting and release preparation. This phase is one where your project really begins to take shape as a whole, usable resource. Have a great week!
