Reaching the Summit: Publishing
Sustaining and Sunsetting Your OER
Key Takeaways
In this chapter we will share how to
- Create workflows for community feedback
- Establish a revising schedule for your OER
- Determine and communicate versioning
- Sunset an OER project
Sustainable Growth
At this point you have set up camp with your OER. You are not alone. Your fellow happy campers include your co-authors, students, and any adopting faculty. All can aid you in trimming forest growth, planting new seeds, and securing fresh water and food to make certain your community thrives. That is, you have an entire community to help you improve your OER, but you are responsible for establishing communication channels, implementing feedback, and deciding to enact significant changes to the OER and project. In this chapter, we will share tips and tools for gathering feedback, sustainably growing and pruning your OER, and making big decisions, like issuing a new version or sunsetting the project.
Select the arrow for guidance on sustainable growth
Gather Feedback
Once you and other faculty start teaching with your OER, you will likely start receiving and thinking of ways to improve your OER. These may be typos discovered by your students for extra credit or larger theoretical updates that come with disciplinary advances. You need to develop strategies and tools to manage feedback from your OER community.
Select the plus signs below for our recommendations for gathering user feedback.
Tips for Managing Suggestions
Prune and Grow with Your Community
As you collect feedback, develop your OER community. Invite adopting faculty to create content, hire work-study students to make corrections, or offer a publishing opportunity to a graduate student. Empowering faculty and student users will assure them that you value their expertise and ensure their investment in your OER and may spark new life for your OER.
Sustainability Working with Students
Watch Sam Arunga, then a professor at Utah State University, share with the Open Education Network how he maintains his OER with his students.
Office Hours: What Happens When My Author Leaves? Policies to Support OER by Open Education Network
Implementing Suggestions
With this community mindset, select the plus signs below for tips to implement feedback to responsively improve your OER.
Sample Version History
The below example from BCcampus Open Education shows how to clearly communicate alterations to an OER by publishing a version history or change log.
There are no hard and fast rules for pruning and growing your OER. You surely will find a natural rhythm in the seasons of the academic year. It is key to communicate alterations to your thriving OER community, though.
Sunsetting OER Projects
Eventually, life changes will come. New adventures may take you away from teaching the class for which you designed your OER, or technologies may become obsolete. You previously drafted a sustainability plan, and now would be a good time to solidify it. Sunsetting an OER project may involve transitioning leadership of the project or leaving the project to fallow.
Select the arrow for guidance in determining if your OER is at its end
What to do When …
Select the plus signs below to explore some steps to navigate the departure of team members, technological changes, and deciding when your project should come to an end.
Communicate the End of Things
If technology proves terminal or your team and you decide to no longer continue with your project, then you should communicate the end of your project. Below are some suggested steps.
Step 1. Tell your institutional OER program coordinator, librarian, or any other supporting staff.
Step 2. Notify faculty users.
Step 3. Post a sunset notice. A sunset notice outlines the project and makes it clear the resource is no longer being updated. Include a
- Notice that the project is no longer being updated.
- Time period of activity.
Iterative Growth
As your OER community grows, so will your OER. You will be able to iterate upon your original version to meet the needs of the faculty and students who teach and learn with your textbook. With seemingly endless possibilities, remain mindful that your community brings many helpful hands to help you create and celebrate each version.
Resources
“Maintain the Book” by Lauri M. Aesoph, from Self-Publishing Guide: A Reference for Writing and Self-Publishing an Open Textbook for BCcampus Open Education, is licensed under CC BY 4.0
“Post-Release and Adoptions Overview” by Apurva Ashok, Zoe Wake Hyde, and Kaitlin Schilling, from The Rebus Guide to Publishing Open Textbooks (So Far), is licensed under CC BY 4.0
“Updates and Revisions” by the Open Education Network, from Authoring Open Textbooks, is licensed under CC BY 4.0.
Image Description
Image 1. Screenshot of a webpage section titled “what is the history engine?” It contains four paragraphs explaining the History Engine project, its goals, how students created and submitted historical episodes based on primary and secondary sources, and how the archive remains available for public reading. A teal footer bar at the bottom credits the Digital Scholarship Lab and the University of Richmond. Transcript: What is the history engine? An active project from 2008 to 2019, the History Engine aimed to enhance historical education and research for teachers, students, and scholars alike. It allowed undergraduate professors to introduce a more collaborative and creative approach to history into their classrooms, while maintaining rigorous academic standards. The core of the History Engine project were student-written episodes—individual snippets of daily life throughout history from the broadest international and national events to the simplest local occurrences. Students constructed these episodes from one or more primary sources found in university and local archives, using historical context gleaned from secondary sources to round out their analysis. Students then posted their entries in our cumulative database, giving their classmates and anyone else who’s interested the opportunity to read and benefit from their work. The History Engine also gave students a more intimate experience with the process of history. Participants who worked with the History Engine project learned the craft of an historian: they examined primary documents, placed these documents in a larger historical context using secondary sources, and prepared cogent analysis of their sources for the public eye. These students went into the project fully aware that future classrooms would engage with and critique their work. Finally, the History Engine provided a way for professors to take advantage of digital technology in their classrooms. The cumulative database provided and still provides all the easy-access and searchability of other websites, but also subjected its contents to a careful academic screening process from instructors as well as librarians, archivists, and teaching assistants. Because only registered students could contribute, each episode was carefully vetted for content and accuracy. Therefore, the contents of the History Engine also provide a previously untapped resource for researchers and academics in general. Student episodes draw from a wide variety of primary documents in both small and large collections from around the country, many of which have yet to appear in scholarly manuscripts. While no longer actively growing, the thousands of episodes researched and written by students over the life of the project can still be read and explored by anyone interested in learning more about the past.
Digital Scholarship Lab © 2008–2020 The University of Richmond [Return to Image 1]
