Sustaining and Improving your OER

Once your OER is released, it’s understandable that you would want to savor the moment, to enjoy the book’s existence in the world and to celebrate having completed a huge piece of work! Nonetheless, while the bulk of your efforts are complete, it’s important to remember that maintaining the book is important — to ensure its ongoing relevance and continued adoption.

This maintenance includes gathering feedback from adopters and readers, which is invaluable for strengthening the text. It’s also necessary, because you will never be able to catch every single typo in the book prior to release, and because you will need to routinely check for broken links, among other changes that are out of your control.

As you maintain your resource, you should include a record of the various changes, edits, additions, and updates that are made over time, known as a version history. Take a look at our version history template and adapt it as needed for your book.

Errors and Corrections

Your readers will spend a lot of time looking at your OER, and they may notice errors that were missed during the editing process, or that have cropped up since publication. These typically fall into a couple of categories:

• Typos and grammatical errors
• Broken links
• Accessibility issues
• Omissions and other factual inaccuracy in content
• Incorrect calculation or solution

You may choose to track and respond to any error reports that readers and adopters of the book have submitted (including thanking them for their keen eyes!) The easiest way to gather user feedback about errors is to include a link to an errata form. The form should be easy to access (usually included in the frontmatter), and should be concise. Typically, these forms include a field for the user to select the error type, a field to indicate the location of the error, and a short answer box to describe the error in detail. You can also include a contact email for suggested corrections.

Corrections to minor errors do not need to be marked as a new edition of the book, nor do they necessarily require comprehensive tracking in the version history. We do recommend, however, that error reports and corrections be listed publicly, so readers can see what those changes are and note them in their teaching and learning contexts, as well as avoid submitting duplicate error reports. Take a look at an example errata list from OpenStax, along with examples of how to share these lists in printed PDF formats. This list can be combined with your version history as a record of updates to noted errors.

Updates to Content

In addition to feedback about typos and other errors, you are likely to receive constructive feedback regarding the content. For instance, you may have been told that a particular unit has proven to be very difficult for students to understand, or that specific elements like case studies, exercises, or references are not as clear as they could be. You may want to incorporate this feedback into your resource’s content, along with  elements that were initially planned for inclusion but didn’t make it into the first release, suggestions from reviewers, proposals from adopters, and ideas you and your team came up with post-release. Additions may also come in the form of ancillary materials, like slide decks, question banks, exercises, and other supplementary content.

These content changes can be split into three categories:

• qualitative improvements to existing content
• quantitative additions to existing content
• disciplinary or thematic updates

The third category of revisions are those that become relevant due to changes within the textbook’s discipline or subject area, or in response to real-world changes that provide new or improved examples of theoretical concepts.

Developing a Maintenance Schedule

Depending on the extent of improvements, additions, and updates to be made, they will need to be carried out at different times after release. A major concern, therefore, is the impact that making changes during the school year will have on students and teachers who are using the book in their courses. This includes the changes made to different formats of the book too, as students may be accessing the resource in a variety of ways (on the web, in other digital formats like EPUB, PDF, MOBI, and as printed copies).

For other improvements and updates, we suggest that you first parse and process the extent of the changes needed, and then plan out a timeline to do so. Some changes may be easier or harder to implement, or require less or more participation from your project team. As you’re deciding on your tasks and timeline, also think through who will make these changes and assign the right people to them. The scale of changes, from classroom feedback to significant additions planned by the team, will determine whether a new edition or a new version of the book will need to be released. The important thing is to be responsive to adopters, readers, and other scholars, and clearly surface the changes that you are making to the text in the version history.

Editions vs. Versions

The differences between a new version of a textbook and a new edition of a textbook bear clarification. As we think of it, a new version contains only minor changes – maintenance and smaller-scale improvements to the existing content. A new edition of the book incorporates major changes to content, such as additions and updates to the original release. New versions of a book are usually indicated by point increments (e.g., 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, …), while new editions are indicated by whole number increases (e.g., 1st edition, 2nd edition, 3rd edition, …).

When significant changes have been made and there is a new version or edition of your resource, inform all of its known adopters before replacing the old format of the book. And if possible, inform everyone of the specific updates, additions, corrections that have been made— either by pointing to the version history, or to a list of improvements (if it is a new edition).

Preservation

As you create new editions of your work, you’ll also want to ensure that preservation copies of the past and current editions are uploaded to the library’s institutional repository, Scholars Compass. The reason is two-fold: first, the repository is the library’s long-term storage. If anything happens to the hosting platform or to your content, you can rest easy knowing you have a backup copy stored in a safe place. Second, saving these copies documents the evolution of your pedagogy and project decisions over time. It provides a record of how your OER responds to user feedback, changes in your discipline or field, and new ideas and innovations.

As part of the program closeout process, the OER Librarian will help you submit your OER to Scholars Compass for preservation. If you have questions about long-term storage, let us know!

This chapter was adapted from OER Primer for Iowa Regents Institutions by Mahrya Burnett, Abbey Elder, and Anne Marie Gruber, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.