Session 9: Review and Feedback
Key Links
- Review Guide Template [adopt and modify]
- Handout for session 9
*Resources – ROTEL Project - Per Barbara, ROTEL has developed a guideline template and a Review Rubric . The Rubric is required of peer reviewers.
*Link to 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 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, and also do a bit of forward thinking about how to share the results of this process!
- Peer Review: ‘Peers’ can offer constructive feedback and solutions to improve the quality of educational content. We encourage you to reflect, recognize, and minimise 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?
- 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.
- 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 the students using the book to learn. Try to identify some academic and non-academic measures as you gather comments from the classroom.
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 engaged in a discussion activity around review and feedback. Then Rick walked us through a textbook, pointing out various elements that will be helpful to you, including the glossary, learning objectives, alt text and captioning images, labeling figures, and providing links to images.
While this 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.