We’re back for a month of weekly meetings that will touch base on some aspects of OER development that tend to pop up in the later stages of your publication. On Friday we’ll discuss review and feedback strategies. Here are the Week 9 slides and handout . We’ll cover different kinds of reviews and discuss workflows for these processes. As a reminder the session will be recorded so if you can’t make it to Friday’s session, you’ll be able to watch the recording afterwards.
If you have any particular questions before the session on Review and Feedback, please reply to this thread and we can bring these questions into our discussion Friday.
Looking forward to seeing you all later this week!
I think getting feedback from students would provide valuable insights on improving the text. Getting their input on how they use the resource would be helpful.
What project specific questions you would like to ask during the review process?
For the statistics project, I’m particularly interested in questions like:
Are examples interesting & relevant to students?
Are themes/key ideas emphasized consistently through the text, or is it still kind of piecemeal?
Are definitions/terms clearly defined and easy to reference?
Does it increase interest in the subject?
So a lot of this would be student-based feedback. I’m not very worried about things like organization as we’ve really left the topics in a standard order.
How will your team attempt to manage the effects of bias in the review process? I think we address bias by striving to ask ourselves the right questions and by considering a broad range of content from various sources.
What non-traditional subject matter experts? I suppose students. I would say community members, but I don’t know if I know anyone who would give their time to review a math book.
A common statement I heard from a few members during the creation process is “I don’t teach that content when I teach the course.” Even though you don’t specifically teach it, some of us may - so I think it should be included in the text if someone who plans on using the resource covers that concept. With that said, I think the review of that material is still needed from someone who doesn’t teach that part of the course, and it should be done with an open-mind to assist for those that will use the content in their course. As it was mentioned for this project, we are all subject matter experts in these courses.
Hey all, it was great seeing those who could attend Friday’s session! It was wonderful to hear how many of you are looking forward to the classroom review and getting feedback from students - I do hope once you start teaching with your resources, you’ll let me know how your students are enjoying them! Below is a brief recap for our session and some suggested homework.
Recap
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 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?
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 that will help you establish review workflows and identify expectations and central guiding questions to better structure your review process and support reviewers. There can be many different lenses/criteria to keep in mind when reviewing the resource, and we suggested coming up with 3-5 central questions to keep things manageable. This is laid out in more detail in the handout for session 9.
Suggested Next Steps
Use the Review Guide Template to firm up the structure around your group’s peer feedback. I don’t consider this a “homework” task because you’re busy working on LOUIS’s summer milestones. However, using something like the Review Guide Template will streamline feedback within your LOUIS group.