Session 9: Review and Feedback - October 2022A Cohort

Textbook Success Program October 2022 A Cohort
1

Hi @oct22-a-cohort!

I hope everyone’s semester is wrapping up nicely. We will be discussing review and feedback in out session on Thursday.

Here are the slides and handout for the upcoming session.

Feel free to post any updates on your projects to this thread!

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Prompt for today’s session:

  1. How will your team attempt to manage the effects of bias in the review process?
  2. How will your team invite a more diverse range of reviews and value a broad range of perspectives?
  3. What non-traditional subject matter experts you’d like to work with? (students, community members, etc.)
  4. What project specific questions you would like to ask during the review process?
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How will your team invite a more diverse range of reviews and value a broad range of perspectives?

I plan to invite Portuguese teachers in both varieties of the language (Brazilian and European) as reviewers. For cultural content, I would like to have reviewers representing Brazil, Portugal and Lusophone Africa. Last, but not least, student feedback will also be included.

4

I suppose my answer applies to questions 2 and 3.

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How will your team attempt to manage the effects of bias in the review process?
I hope to minimize bias by reviewing the OER for accessibility, dei considerations, bias free language, and placing the diverse voices of the book’s content in the center of the book and the overall narrative.

How will your team invite a more diverse range of reviews and value a broad range of perspectives?
I would like to employ the three types of review in order to gain a broader perspective on the content and work as a whole.

What non-traditional subject matter experts you’d like to work with? (students, community members, etc.)
The main audience for my OER is students so students will be the most important readers to work with on the book. And since I teach the class associated with the OER this spring, I’ll have an opportunity to work with students on it.

What project specific questions you would like to ask during the review process?
I’m not sure yet. I think I’ll know once I have done more work on the content and formatting.

6

Well answering as an individual, not for Bridget, I think that

  1. Not really sure about any bias handling. I think we just have to be aware of who we are asking in order to make sure it is a diverse group, including both people who might teach with the book and people who are experts in the field. We really will want to have people who know about similar student populations and institutions.

  2. Fortunately we can start with the Lehman and CUNY base and network out from there. We are each active in various communities of scholars and teachers and also student affairs staff and scholars.

  3. We will definitely be sharing this with students. We may start with specific chapters or sections of the book rather than throw the whole thing at them. There are two different groups of students, ones who are currently in the process of their first semester or two, and then those who have been through it.

  4. For students: Is this interesting to read or engage with? Is it helping you think about being in college? Are you getting ideas?
    For recent first years: Does this talk about what you wish someone had talked to you about?
    Is it engaging? Is there anything inaccurate? Is there anything missing?

For faculty: How would you use it? Do you have thoughts about coverage, is it too detailed or not detailed enough? Are topics relevant or irrelevant?

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Hi @oct22-a-cohort and happy new year!

Here’s a recap of our last session and the chat transcript.

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.

This 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!

  1. 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?
  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 froListeningm 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.

In the final part of our session, we asked you to think ahead to how storytelling can be used to communicate the quality of your resource. We prompted you with discussion questions to help you and your teams think of ways to center equity during the review process. We want to compile all your answers here so you and other cohort participants, in this group and in concurrent cohorts can share and learn from one another. Head to the forum and respond to the prompts, located under Session 9: Review and Feedback.

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.

On Thursday, 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.