7.2: Post-Release & Adoptions Overview
Congratulations — you’ve released your OER and that is no easy feat! We hope you and your teams have been able to celebrate the impressive process of creating (or remixing) an OER.
You’ve also made it to the final stage of the publishing process! As shown in the image below, if you were to continue along the cycle, you’ll end up in Project Scoping, which is where you started your journey. The Adoptions and Post-release phase is an exciting one — continuing on from the celebrations of release planning — as you determine how your OER is being used, what impact it is having, and how to share this more widely. This insight can sometimes act as a spark for ways to revise, update, or improve your OER, which you can scope and continue to work on as the cycle indicates.
Once your OER is released, it’s understandable that you would want to savour the moment, to enjoy the resource’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 leads to one of the biggest questions that often gets missed in the publishing process: what is the workflow to enrich future versions of your resource?
This part of The Rebus Guide to Publishing Open Textbooks (So Far) will take you through your OER’s journey following its Big Release — what happens when it is used in the classroom? How do you keep it up-to-date so it stays relevant going forward? There are many possibilities for adaptation and growth that your OER allows and this will feed back into the community around the resource.
OER Improvements & Maintenance
We like to think of OER as living documents, which only tend to change and evolve over time in order to better respond to the needs of you and others who are using it. In creating OER, we hold a shared responsibility to make sure we are responsive to feedback, mindful of further accessibility improvements needed, paying attention to changes needed based on evolving conversations in the discipline and more. It’s important for educational materials to stay current — be it in terms of form or content!
Maintaining an OER doesn’t need to be a complicated matter. As we see it, maintenance includes ongoing changes that are more about function than content, made at any point, during the academic year. This entails keeping tabs on the book with an eye to grammatical errors, typos, or broken links. You may also 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, and perhaps asking if they want to get involved with other improvements!)
OER, regardless of whether they are web-based or printed, need some amount of editorial attention to remain valuable resources. If your resource is hosted on the web, part of the maintenance process sh