Post-Publication
19 Updates, Sustaining & New Editions
Apurva Ashok; Zoe Wake Hyde; Lauri Aesoph; Lisa Petrides; Douglas Levin; C. Edward Watson; and LynleyShimat Renée Lys
Introduction: Updates, Sustaining & New Editions
This chapter goes over best practices for keeping track of updates to your open textbook, sustaining your open textbook, and preparing for new editions of your open textbook.
Table of Contents: Updates, Sustaining & New Editions
- The CARE Framework
- Updates and Revisions
- Maintain The Book
- Improvements and Maintenance Summary
- Improvements and Maintenance Overview
- Feedback & Suggestions — Sample, Rebus Guide 2.0
- Version History — Sample, Rebus Guide 2.0
- Versioning History – Sample, BCcampus
Adoption
Adoption Summary — Rebus Guide 2.0, Apurva Ashok & Zoe Wake Hyde
Having your book adopted by an instructor for use in a given course is a vote of confidence about its overall quality and value to learners.
Whether or not adoption is the explicit goal you’ve been working towards, the open license on your book is nonetheless an indicator that you recognize that others can benefit from your book. It’s therefore worth putting in some effort to encourage and track adoptions.
Recognize the implications of the open license. The openness of OER means a lot for students and instructors, including access and use with few or no barriers. At the same time, openness can make it hard to keep track of who’s using the book.Be transparent and consensual about the data you’re collecting. State explicitly what information you’re asking for and how it may be used. Follow the guidelines in your region, so that adopters are comfortable and informed when submitting their details.
Spread the word far and wide. The larger the group of people who know about your book, the greater the likelihood of adoptions and reported adoptions.
Be responsive to grow the community of practice. Act on adopter and student feedback, and put adopters in touch with each other and the rest of the project team. Remain attentive to ways in which adopters can help expand and update the text.
Be flexible! Adopters might not follow your preferred methods of reporting, but it’s still a win if they’re using the book and letting you know!
The community around your book will grow with time, but to start it includes:
- Project manager: sets up Adoption Forms, submits reports about the book’s impact, communicates with the group of adopters
- Authors: connect with potential adopters, can be adopters themselves, revise content based on feedback from adopters and students
- Editors: connect with potential adopters, can be adopters themselves, review feedback from adopters and students, decide which changes are immediate and which should wait for newer versions or editions of the book
- Reviewers: connect with potential adopters, can be adopters themselves
- Students: provide feedback about the book after using it in their classroom
- New Adopters: use the book in their classroom, join the community around the book, participate in revising or expanding the book
While there are technical challenges in tracking how many people are using your book and in getting them to join your community, you can start with the following:
- Create a clear and simple Adoption Form that also explains why the information is being collected, how it may be used, and by whom.
- Ensure there are clear ways for adopters to find the form and communicate with the team.
- Keep a master spreadsheet of adopters.
- Poll all the existing team members to find out if they are going to use the book.
- Follow up regularly about the effect of the book on withdrawal and retention rates in classrooms.
- Introduce adopters to one another, and conduct conference calls during the semester about book usage.
- Get permission from adopters to use their names and affiliations, and any praise for the book, in promotional materials.
- Ask adopters to share their experience of using the book at conferences, in presentations, in their writing, on listservs, and elsewhere.
- Share ancillary materials with adopters and brainstorm with them about what else is needed to improve the book.
Not everyone who uses the book will want to engage with you and its community, including reporting their adoption. Not knowing the exact number of adopters may be a bit disappointing, so it’s important to focus on the limitless use of the book you’ve enabled with its license and formats!
Read on to learn more about the whys and hows of adoption.
Adoption Overview — Rebus Guide 2.0, Apurva Ashok & Zoe Wake Hyde
This part of The Rebus Guide to Publishing Open Textbooks (So Far) will take you through the life of the book following its Big Release and into its use in classrooms. Whether you’ve created an open textbook just for your classroom or for a much wider group of instructors, it’s no doubt exciting, gratifying, and a little nerve-wracking to see the book adopted and put into action. In this section, we’ll cover things like creating and using adoption forms, collecting feedback, tracking usage, and more. This section is mainly about how to find people to use your resource in their class, and engage with them; if you’re looking for more instructions on how to design your course around an OER, keep an eye on expansions to the Guide!
As in the other sections of the Guide, these suggestions are based on our experience with open textbook projects. If you have questions about this overview, or suggestions for what else we should include, please share them in the Rebus Community project home. This document is an evolving draft, based on what we have learned so far in managing open textbook projects and gathering community feedback. We welcome your thoughts and contributions, including ways to improve the Guide overall.
The significance of adoptions
From having your open textbook used in a single section of a single course to seeing an entire university department incorporate it into all their classes, “adoption” can mean a variety of things. In our framing, having a resource adopted generally means that it has been assigned, either in part or in full, as part of the materials for a given course.
In any case, adoption is often the moment that you’ve been working for. Even if you embarked on this project simply to create a book for your own class or course, the fact that you decided to apply an open license to the book means that you’ve already been thinking of other educators and students that might benefit from your work in the long run. So, once you reach the point of releasing your book, it’s worth it to put in a bit of effort to encourage and track adoptions.
Adoptions are an important measure of impact for a book for all sorts of reasons. Given the amount of time and effort you and your collaborators have put into it, it can be incredibly validating to see your book go out into the world and be used by others. Adoptions can also demonstrate the value of a text to your discipline, as it’s a vote of confidence from adopters, and they also help validate the quality of the book, which in turn encourages more adoptions!
What’s more, tracking adoptions is also important when it comes to showing the impact of OER at your institution, to your professional associations, in grant reports, and for future funding applications. These processes often require hard numbers to show value (for better or worse!), so if you do a little bit of work up front, you can have these numbers to hand when the time comes. The information you collect about adoptions is a powerful tool to make the case for OER, as it demonstrates the direct impact on students. This helps make the case for increased institutional investment in the creation of new OER and to the maintenance and further adoption of existing resources.
Lastly, adoptions are yet another extension of the theme of all open textbook publishing as we see it: collaboration! Everyone and anyone who is using the book, who benefits from this content being openly licensed, is an asset. By connecting with adopters, you can create more opportunities to gather feedback, new contributions, ideas, updates, spinoffs, ancillaries and more, and it all comes from people who are just as invested as you are in the book being maintained and improved in the long term. Each time the book is adopted, the community around it becomes larger. Making sure you can find those adopters (and they can find you!) can make all the difference in keeping a book alive over time.
The basics of getting and tracking adoptions
As discussed in other sections of the Guide, a major portion of setting up feedback and reporting channels for adoption takes place during the release preparation. Even so, you can also start thinking about adoptions as early as content creation, editing, and review. Along the way to release, you have hopefully collected a list of people (and their email addresses!) who are interested in the book and have shown signs of wanting to adopt it when it is ready.
The main place to start is to set up an adoption form to track usage, and find out if anyone has already started using the book in their courses. Check out our Adoption Form as an example of what this form can look like (it can be modified to include more or less detail as needed). The best way to track adoptions is to ask users to self-report via the adoption form, so make sure this form is visible clearly from the book’s home page, and that it is also in any major communications about the book, like the official announcement. Lastly, make sure to include clear pathways for communication, so adopters know how to contact you or other folks who are using the book. This can be as simple as a link to the Rebus Community project home, your email address, or other contact information.
Once the form has been set up, you can start promoting your book and encouraging educators to adopt it. An easy way to begin is to poll all your team members (contributors, volunteer, advisors etc.), asking if they might be interested in using the book now that it has been released and to fill out the form if so. You can also turn towards more traditional methods of soliciting adoptions, such as sharing the release announcement and some copies of the book with instructors or department heads. Following the big release, keep the noise and momentum around the book going by talking it up within your network, at conferences, and ask other members on your team and staff at your campus to do the same! Keep your resource’s unique selling points in mind during these conversations, and also point to any additional items that could be packaged along with the book (such as slide decks, question banks, instructor workbooks, or other ancillaries) to motivate and attract people to adopt your book. Remember, the larger the group of people who know about your book, the higher the possibility of reported adoptions.
After adoptions have been reported
Ideally, you should set up the Adoption Form and communications pathways prior to releasing your book. Once you start receiving adoption reports, we recommend reaching out to these people, both to let them know how appreciative you are, and to build on the momentum. Gauge how interested they are in giving feedback, and do your best to bring them into the fold! (Some people will just want to use the book and not get involved, which is perfectly fine. Just make sure they have a clear line back to you if ever they need or want to use it, and you never know when they might show up again.)
For those who are keen, here are some ways to engage them:
- Put adopters in touch with one another, so that there are multiple lines of communication within the community of users.
- Conduct conference calls with the group, so that they can share observations and feedback about the book as they are teaching with it.
- Request permission to use their name and/or affiliation in your own reporting about adoptions.
- Request quotes from them about using the book, which can be added to promotional materials in order to inspire others to adopt the book as well.
- Ask each adopter to share their experience of using the book during conference presentations, in a blog post, on listserv messages, and within their networks.
- Share any ancillary materials with the group, or if none exist, brainstorm types that should be created, and ways to make them collaboratively.
Throughout, make sure you keep an eye on how adopters can help expand and update the text. This group of people believe in and are invested in your book, so they are more likely to be willing to help maintain and update it over time.
What information should you collect, and how?
We’ve found that it’s best to start with a simple form, so that those responding aren’t too overwhelmed. As you get more comfortable with the group of adopters over time, you can also ask them to provide more information about how the book is being used, building on the initial questions in your Adoption Form. Find the right balance between the full information you would like to have down the line and those details that you absolutely need up front.
Some information is easier to ask for outside of the form, too, so keep track of those questions (and why you are asking them) for when the right occasion arises. In the spirit of transparent and consensual data collection, it’s important to be clear and explicit about the reasons you are collecting certain information. If possible, also tell them what you will be doing with it. For instance, if you’re using the book in your course, you might want to get in touch with the folks on your campus who monitor information like student retention or withdrawal rates, and ask other adopters to do the same. With that kind of information collected, you can build the case for the relevance of your course, for a departmental adoption of your book, and for the increased use of OER. Telling your adopters the impact of the information that they share can help incentivize them to submit data and feel more comfortable doing so.
Another suggestion is to keeping an eye out for broader OER tracking projects, like SPARC’s initiative to report USD $1 billion in student savings, and see what information might be required for these projects. Accordingly, update your own Adoption form or follow-up questions that you routinely send new adopters. You might also look at repositories that ask for adoption information, to either expand your form or find out if any adoptions of your book have been reported. For examples, see BCcampus’ Adoption Form and their Open Textbook Statistics page.
Use whatever information you have available, whether it is data reported by adopters in the form, statistics from your institutional repository, statistics from other repositories, analytics from Pressbooks (or wherever your book is hosted), etc. In so doing, however, don’t forget to also listen to adopter and student feedback about the book’s content and structure. We have an entire section about improving your textbook, which includes what you can do with the feedback you receive. Ultimately, because tracking OER adoptions can’t rely on the more conventional metric of unit sales, it will always be an issue of thinking creatively and paying attention to alternative forms and types of usage data.
Challenges with tracking open textbook and OER use
While we’ve set out what we’ve found to be best practices tracking adoptions here, things will always play out a little differently than expected in practice. For a start, when it comes to the data you collect, changing or adding metrics to your original Adoption Form over time, either based on your own needs, or what you’ve seen others collect, can result in a messy data set. You may need to contact those who filled out older versions of the form, asking them to provide additional information. It is an extra step for both of you, but generally worth it for the data!
As well, be ready to collect information in other ways. Although you may have set up clear pathways to your adoption form (or other data-collection mechanism), it may be that adopters will end up contacting you via email or your Rebus Community project home. Make sure you record this information in a master spreadsheet. Even if they didn’t use your preferred methods to communicate this information, it’s still a win that they are using the book!
Keep in mind, too, that you might come across some adopters who are not interested in engaging with the community or contributing a lot of information. Don’t try to force them to share or do more than they are willing. Not everyone has the time or energy or interest to be an active member of the adopter group, and that’s okay. Thank them for being interested in the resource, and continue to update them as the book lives on. (You may win them over down the road.)
And finally, remember that one of the best things about your book is also what makes it hard to keep track of who’s using it. Sharing your work as a web-native resource (we hope!) with an open license means it can be hard to know exactly who is using it, where, and how. Anyone can have access to your book’s website, or download it in different formats, without barriers – which is a good thing! But while this kind of openness is a big part of the power of OER, and opens up all kinds of exciting possibilities, it also poses a challenge to assessing how the resource is being used. Think of it this way: the same barriers that traditionally limit access to books are also the most accurate ways to collect information about how a book is being used (think sales, account logins etc.).
With fewer barriers to access in place, open textbook creators have to rely on self-reporting by adopters. Many will happily do so, but some won’t, for all sorts of reasons. It might be due to lack of clarity about the adoption form, not know the form exists, lack of time or attention, or a lack of incentive or motivation. While it can be a bit annoying to not know the exact number of people using your book (or to not even know if you know or not), take pride in the limitless use you’ve enabled with the license and formats! There’s something very exciting about sharing your work without knowing exactly where and how it will be used. Moreover, you won’t be alone in feeling frustrated – everyone in the OER community is with you! Solutions to this issue are in the works, and if you have any suggestions to offer based on your experiences collecting adoption information, let us know in the Rebus Community project home!
Ultimately, even if you did everything possible to set yourself up for success to track adoptions and engage adopters, it may not happen the way you want. This is okay – your book is a gift, and what matters is that it is available and accessible to all those who want or need it.
Need further assistance?
We hope these suggestions will help you keep track of how your resource is being used around the world. We’ll continue to add to the Guide as we work with more projects, and we welcome your ideas on what else we might add, as well as your feedback on how these approaches have worked (or not!) for you.
If you have questions, or anything to add, please let us know in the Rebus Community project home.
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Track Adoptions — BCcampus, Lauri M. Aesoph
One of the side benefits of self-publishing an open textbook is an automatic membership in the open education community for which it is written. As the author of an open textbook, you are in a unique position that not only allows you to pinpoint members of this community — by tracking instructors who use or adopt your book in the classroom — but also establishes you as an OER contributor.
Capturing and recording open textbook adoptions in British Columbia is a key task for BCcampus Open Education. We ask faculty using open textbooks to fill out our Adoption of an Open Textbook form [New Tab] by providing us with their name and institution, the course for which the textbook is used, the number of students enrolled in each section of the course, the cost of the displaced textbook, the terms in which the adoption occurs, and whether the adoption will be ongoing. We also ask adopters if we may share their information with other interested faculty.
Surprisingly, this work has proven to be more than just about numbers. It has also led BCcampus to our province’s flourishing open education community. Tracking adoptions has helped our team to connect with and support faculty and staff interested in open education. Paying attention to who is using open textbooks has revealed open education trends in B.C.’s colleges, institutes, and universities, and has given us the ability to connect the dots — and make introductions — between likeminded colleagues.
For your textbook, decide how you will track its adoptions and what statistics you’ll collect. Add the details to your communications plan. (See Communications.) Here is a template that can be used to record these numbers:
Remind colleagues who are using your textbook — or potential adopters — that they are free to customize it to fit the requirements of their curriculum, students, and teaching style. (See the BCcampus Open Education Adaptation Guide [New Tab].) You can ask adopters for comments about what they like about the book and if they have suggestions for changes or additions that might improve the book, items you can take note of your next edition. These individuals might even agree to writing a review or assisting with an update. (See Maintain the Book and Textbook Reviews.)
Put your stats to work
Like reviews, posting adoption statistics will encourage other instructors to look at your textbook. The amount of information you share and post by your textbook will depend on the permissions granted by current adopters who have contacted you. You might choose to present anonymized numbers that show the total number of instructors, institutions, savings, and students affected.
At BCcampus, we display adoption statistics in two views. On our website’s home page, a banner containing aggregated numbers on student savings, total adoptions, and number of participating institutions in British Columbia are posted.
When the “More Stats…” link [New Tab] (circled in red in the above image) is clicked, then details about these numbers are revealed on another web page, along with definitions for the various terms used to describe adoption statistics (see below).
Lastly, consider how to analyze your adoption statistics. For instance, you might examine them for trends by geography, course level and type, and term or semester. Use these numbers to guide the ongoing promotion of your book and to educate current and future users.
Long Descriptions
Image long description: The BCcampus Open Education website stats page
Student savings | $5,240,407.00 to $5,755,283.00 |
Number of B.C. students using open textbooks | 56,667 |
Number of B.C. institutions currently adopting | 42 |
Top 5 adopting institutions (in order) |
|
Number of known B.C. faculty adopting | 407 |
Adoption: Each adoption refers to a course section within a specific term and year for which an open textbook has replaced a primary textbook or educational resource that must be purchased.
Faculty: The number of individual instructors who have adopted one or more open textbooks for one or more course sections. A faculty member is only counted once.
Savings: Savings include a range. The number at the lower end is calculated as follows: number of students (see “Students”) times $100 (This number was derived by OpenStax College based on a formula that takes into account used textbook purchases and rental costs as well as new textbook costs.) The number at the upper end is calculated as follows: number of students (see “Students”) times the actual cost of the textbook being replaced if purchased as hard copy and new.
Students: The total number of students in a course section within which an open textbook is used as the primary educational resource.
Attributions
BCcampus Open Education website (screenshots) are used under a CC BY 4.0 International Licence.
Improvements & Maintenance
- The CARE Framework
- Updates and Revisions
- Maintain The Book
- Improvements and Maintenance Summary
- Improvements and Maintenance Overview
- Feedback & Suggestions – Sample
- Version History – Sample
The CARE Framework — Lisa Petrides, Douglas Levin, and C. Edward Watson
Introduction
The creation, curation, and widespread use of open educational resources (OER) is making a significant difference in democratizing access to a high-quality education. From a burgeoning movement launched over 15 years ago, to a growing field, to national and global impact, teachers and learners in increasing numbers are participating in and benefiting from a process driven by the collaborative development and sharing of educational materials that are freely available for anyone to use, unrestricted by traditional copyright.
From K-12 districts, to academic libraries, to ministries of education, to consortia of community colleges and universities, what started as a small group of loosely coupled academic institutions, organizations, and education-facing foundations has catapulted to the front pages of education journals and the mainstream press. Aligned to issues such as college affordability, equal access to education, personalized learning, and the professionalism of teaching, it is clear that the field of OER is not only here to stay, but is central to global efforts to improve education outcomes for all students.
Rooted in analogous “open” efforts, including open source software and open access journals, the field of OER has come to be recognized as one that can inject innovation into long-standing institutional practices, such as procurement and curriculum decision-making, but also into business models that can better serve the interests of both students and educators.
However, similar to the debates in open source software over the past three decades, the mechanisms for how individuals, organizations, and institutions should be able to use and reuse OER have become more complex. In some cases, OER creators have expressed concerns about the perceived use of their contributions. In other cases, the restricted rights of users to access and use learning objects, especially in digital platforms and in a commercial context, add to uncertainty around OER adoption.
If the field of OER is to continue on its trajectory from a nascent movement to the mainstream of education, it is incumbent on OER advocates and stakeholders—including educators, librarians, instructional technologists, and content developers—to address how we might sustainably scale the movement over time and across diverse contexts, while still staying true to the values of openness that attracted so many to OER in the first place.
It is for that reason, we developed and are pleased to introduce the CARE Framework. Its purpose is to both support and make more explicit the valuable work that is being done and needs to be done in building a sustainable open education ecosystem.
The CARE Framework
The purpose of the CARE Framework is to articulate a set of shared values and a collective vision for the future of education and learning enabled by the widespread adoption and use of OER. It aims to address the question of how an individual, institution, or organization seeking to be a good steward can contribute to the growth and sustainability of the OER movement consistent with the community’s values.
While OER typically reside in the public domain or have an alternative license that specifies how a resource may be reused, adapted, and shared, the use of an open license is in itself insufficient to addressing broader sustainability and ethical questions. Indeed, the predominant business models of the educational technology and publishing industries have been predicated on the concept of access limitations and scarcity. As such, the time is past due for the OER community to be more explicit and intentional about the ways in which OER are produced, packaged, and delivered.
At the center of the CARE Framework (see figure below) are a wide variety of stakeholders—OER creators and users, working as individuals and as part of organizations, in traditional and non-traditional educational settings—seeking to act as good stewards of the values of a sustainable OER movement. Locating people at the center of the CARE Framework serves to remind us first and foremost of the broader social context and purpose of the OER movement.
Figure 1: The CARE Framework for OER Stewardship
People serving as OER stewards pursue a wide variety of strategies and tactics relevant to their specific context to improve access to education and opportunity over time. Yet, what all good OER stewards should have in common is a commitment to practices that serve to demonstrate their duty of care to the broader OER movement:
- Contribute: OER stewards actively contribute to efforts, whether financially or via in-kind contributions, to advance the awareness, improvement, and distribution of OER; and
- Attribute: OER stewards practice conspicuous attribution, ensuring that all who create or remix OER are properly and clearly credited for their contributions; and
- Release: OER stewards ensure OER can be released and used beyond the course and platform in which it was created or delivered; and
- Empower: OER stewards are inclusive and strive to meet the diverse needs of all learners, including by supporting the participation of new and non-traditional voices in OER creation and adoption.
It is our belief that if the four practices that comprise the CARE Framework—Contribute, Attribute, Release, and Empower—are widely adopted, the ecosystem of OER stakeholders will diversify, the use and adoption of OER will grow, and the future of education and learning will benefit via greater access, equity, affordability, and relevance.
Contribute
OER stewards actively contribute to efforts, whether financially or via in-kind contributions, to advance the awareness, improvement, and distribution of OER.
The OER movement is a growing community of individuals working across institutions and organizations all around the world, collaborating to improve educational access and outcomes for all learners. In any community, fostering the need or desire of people to contribute to its success is of paramount importance. It is not enough for individuals to simply take, but also to give back, if the goal is to create a sustainable and thriving community. The OER community is no different. It behooves good OER stewards to be intentional about the ways in which their actions support the health and well-being of the broader OER movement itself.
With respect to the OER community, we define ‘contribute’ to mean several specific activities and means of support. First, financial and in-kind contributions are necessary to support efforts that raise awareness of the benefits and affordances of OER, in policy and in the classroom. Second, the development, maintenance, continued improvement, and customization of OER is a vital service that OER community members can provide. And, third, contributions and support are needed to help further the distribution and dissemination of OER for students who have historically lacked such access, including support for multiple languages, accessible formats, and for low bandwidth use. Today, while many benefit from the past contributions of members of the OER community, the sustainability of the movement itself is directly related to the future health and vibrancy of new community contributions.
Attribute
OER stewards practice conspicuous attribution, ensuring that all who create or remix OER are properly and clearly credited for their contributions.
The invitation for anyone with the means and willingness to contribute to the OER movement via the act of authorship—whether of original works, such as activities, lesson plans or simulations, or revisions to previously published works—is one of the key innovations that differentiates the production of OER from traditional educational publishing. This democratization of the production and refinement of instructional materials elevates practitioner and student voices and is welcoming of non-traditional subject matter experts willing to share their expertise with others.
Inherent in this approach is the belief that the quality, relevance, and usefulness of materials is derived, at least in part, from the collaborative contributions of the OER community to those materials over time. In this way, contributions of OER authorship are leveraged time and again to the benefit of learners. At the same time, good OER stewards recognize that the provenance of OER materials matters and that the authors of and contributors to all OER materials deserve the community’s respect and recognition for their efforts. For this reason, the CARE Framework asserts that we must practice conspicuous attribution to ensure that all who create or remix OER are clearly credited for their contributions.
Release
OER stewards ensure OER can be released and used beyond the course and platform in which it was created or delivered.
The day-to-day experience that educators and students have with OER is often mediated by one or more technological platforms. While there are many considerations in selecting a technological platform to access and manage OER, it is important to note that not all platforms are designed equally well to foster a sustainable and vibrant ecosystem of OER use and remix. For instance, if a platform mixes OER content with all rights reserved materials and obscures their difference to users, many of the most important benefits of OER are lost.
Therefore, good OER stewards, recognizing these issues, seek to design and use technology platforms and systems that facilitate the goals of the OER movement, including by supporting the broadest possible use and collaborative revision and remix of materials over time. This includes providing tools to allow users to download and share content beyond the course or platform in which it was created or delivered. The evaluation of the features of technological platforms are especially important to OER stewards, given that many students and educators are not able to make individual choices about the platforms they use, as this is most often decided at the institutional level.
Empower
OER stewards are inclusive and strive to meet the diverse needs of all learners, including by supporting the participation of new and non-traditional voices in OER creation and adoption.
Time and again, policy and market forces have failed to incentivize the publishing and technology industries to proactively meet the needs of all learners. What resources get created, how academic topics are covered, from what perspectives, for which learners, and in what formats are all decisions that have been centralized in the hands of commercial publishers. Indeed, the scarcity of affordable, high-quality resources in specific subjects and for select populations has too often been presented as a fait accompli. Yet, this is a future that OER stewards reject. The OER movement values and supports both the creation and the remix of resources for diverse and underserved learners, whether they are individuals with disabilities, speak a minority language, or are seeking education in a non-traditional setting.
In the same way, OER stewards elevate the participation of new and non-traditional voices in OER production and remix. By reducing the traditional barriers to creating and sharing resources and with a commitment to conspicuous attribution, the OER movement benefits and is itself enriched from the broad participation of individuals seeking to share their expertise and contributions with others. In turn, this commitment to new and non-traditional voices will help the OER movement to better serve a more inclusive and diverse set of educators and learners.
Applying the CARE Framework
The values expressed by the CARE Framework support a hopeful vision for the future of OER and education, positively impacting not only issues of access and affordability, but also the seemingly intractable issues of equity and inclusion. Thus the CARE Framework is meant to be applied by all individuals, organizations, and institutions who share a stake in the field’s long-term success and sustainability. This includes individuals who create or adapt OER for their own teaching and learning purposes; nonprofit OER publishers and libraries; commercial OER publishers; as well as educational technology vendors looking to incorporate OER into their products or services.
For those new to OER, we hope that the CARE Framework serves to shine a light on a set of norms and practices that serve to encourage, rather than discourage, increased collaboration and sharing of content. And given the existing complexities of content ownership, licenses, and technology platforms, our goal is to provide insights into the mission-driven context of this work. In particular, it is our hope that through application of the CARE Framework that all educators will feel confident in their exploration and adoption of OER.
In advancing this framework, our goal is be explicit about the values that we think are core to the OER movement, including the practices of individuals and organizations that are involved in the production, dissemination, and use of OER. While it is beyond the scope of this initial paper to enumerate all of the many practices that support good OER stewardship, our intent is to invoke a more nuanced and meaningful discussion about the individual and organizational practice of OER and openness in education and for learning. We hope that affiliation with the OER community means something to those who participate in it, and it is with that goal in mind that we offer up the CARE Framework.
Lisa Petrides, Ph.D., is CEO and Founder of the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education (ISKME).
Douglas Levin is President and Founder of EdTech Strategies, LLC.
C. Edward Watson, Ph.D., is CIO and Associate Vice President for Quality, Advocacy, and LEAP Initiatives at the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U).
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Updates and Revisions — Open Textbook Network, Melissa Falldin & Karen Lauritsen
Textbook updates and revisions generally fall into two categories: errata and editions.
An erratum is a writing or printing error. When errors are corrected in future versions, a list of corrected errata is sometimes included in the textbook.
An edition reflects significant changes to the textbook, often to reflect developments in the discipline or a new approach to the content. Whether or not changes warrant a new edition is often subjective.
Regardless, in order for a textbook to remain relevant, it’s good practice to set aside time to review the textbook and consider making updates and revisions. This ensures that the content you’re offering reflects current developments in the field. This can be done on an annual schedule, and is often most convenient in the summer.
Authors who publish their own open textbook have direct access to the content. That means authors can make changes whenever they see fit, including to correct errors as they are discovered (the work of which can be efficiently crowd sourced by users). Libraries funding open textbook projects and supporting their publication can incorporate annual updates into the grant process and timeline development.
When a new edition is released, be sure to update all of the locations where the textbook is shared. For example, if the textbook is available through the Open Textbook Library or an institutional repository, you will want to inform them of the new edition. A simple email with a link to the latest files is usually sufficient and appreciated.
Maintain the Book — BCcampus, Lauri M. Aesoph
Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.
-Kurt Vonnegut[1]
It can be said — or is assumed — that a textbook released with an open-copyright license is maintained by the community that uses it. However, the reality is that many open textbooks aren’t changed — at least the original versions — once they’ve been published. Instructors who adopt an open textbook might customize it for their own use and maintain a private copy, but the community may or may not benefit from these improvements.
Textbooks that have an individual or organization that takes responsibility for its ongoing quality and viability tend to experience the highest adoption rates. At BCcampus Open Education, we have learned that the most successful textbooks are the ones with authors that take an active interest in their maintenance by paying attention to errors, noting potential improvements, and promoting their book amongst colleagues.
The first step when creating your post-publication plan is to layout how your completed book will be maintained. This involves setting up ways to receive and record feedback, fixing reported errors, and planning for revisions and new editions. There is a lot to keep track of, so setting up a schedule can be helpful.
Feedback
Give your readers a way to offer feedback about your textbook. Some authors do this by adding a line to the preface or introduction that invites suggestions. You can provide your contact information such as an email or create a feedback page can be added to the front or back section of the textbook. This feedback page should contain details about the kind of feedback you’re looking for and how the reader can submit comments.
If the textbook is housed in an online platform that doesn’t use page numbers, it can be difficult for readers to clearly describe what section of the text they want to comment on. In your call for feedback, encourage readers to be as specific as possible in their description of the location of their comments. Alternatively, some online platforms have a comments feature that can be enabled. Another option would be to use an external (and open source) annotation system, such as Hypothes.is [New Tab], which allows users to leave comments directly on a web page.
Think about how you will process feedback. The treatment for each item will depend on what has been reported: an error, new information, a potential resource to add, or suggestion on the structure of the textbook. It is also good practice to respond to recommendations by thanking your colleague for taking the time to write to you. If you have information about how to use your textbook or ideas about supplementary materials, include these in your response.
Another way to collect feedback on your textbook is to give instructors the opportunity to submit a review of your textbook. (See Textbook Reviews.)
Errors
Regardless of how carefully a book is copy edited and proofread, it will probably contain errors after publication. Your job is to accept this fact, create a system that allows readers to report errors to you, and develop a means to correct these errors. BCcampus Open Education uses a Report a Textbook Error form [New Tab]. A feedback form that invites error reporting might be sufficient for you, or you can just provide an email where people can contact you.
Think about who will make the corrections. This can be you or someone else, like a student assistant or copy editor. This will often depend on who has access to the book’s source files after publication. (See Remove Platform Access.) Also, how often will corrections be made? Will you fix them immediately? Monthly? Quarterly? And how will you respond to the individual reporting the mistake? A simple thank you with a description of how and when the error will be addressed is one way.
Develop a means to track and record corrected errors for your readers’ reference. You can use an erratum — a record of errors and their corrections for a book or other publication — that is added to your book. Or, like BCcampus, record adjustments on a Versioning History page. If there is more than one format or file type for which the textbook is available, remember to update these and note the date on the erratum or Versioning History page.
Revisions
Many authors are already thinking about the next edition of their textbook before the first edition is published. They realize that their textbook is a snapshot of information and that this information will continue to evolve after the book is published, so they plan for the next edition immediately. (Remember: Writing a book will never feel finished. There is always something that can be changed, improved, or added. At some point you will need to stop and say “good enough.”)
Some authors prepare by collecting notes about what they’d like to change, and material and resources they want to add to the next edition. Others create a duplicate copy of their book — easy to do in Pressbooks, for example — and use it as a template for the next edition. If you want to plan ahead for the next edition, decide how much new and changed information warrants a new edition, and how often this might occur.
Schedule
The maintenance schedule for your book can and should include all tasks that will keep your book relevant and current. Develop a timetable and process for each of the following:
- Responding to, reviewing, and incorporating feedback
- Checking and fixing links and embedded multimedia in online books
- Correcting reported/detected errors
- Adding minor updates to keep the content current
- Creating a new edition
Don’t forget to inform colleagues and collections that use and host your textbook about significant changes. (See Communications and Track Adoptions.)
Improvements and Maintenance Summary — Rebus Guide 2.0, Apurva Ashok & Zoe Wake Hyde
Every book should have an ‘afterlife’ beyond its initial use — changing and evolving to ensure ongoing relevance and continued adoption. Regardless of whether your resource is web-based or printed, it will need some amount of editorial attention in order to remain valuable.
In this way, your role shifts from creation to a focus on maintenance, updates, corrections, and planning or coordinating future versions and editions.
Maintain the resource so as to strengthen it and improving its perception. Books that are not updated can be seen as out of date and therefore not be considered seriously by potential adopters.
Be responsive to changes in theory, discourse, and practice. Corrections, updates, and additions can be based on reviewer and adopter feedback, as well as wider shifts in the book’s discipline or subject area.
Be public about in-progress and completed updates. Anyone invested in the resource will be motivated to keep it up to date; informing them about expected improvements can prompt them to help or simply look forward to the update.
Carefully time when you carry out changes. Although making changes to OER is relatively easy and flexible, be considerate towards current users of the book. Updates in the middle of a semester or teaching period can have a disruptive impact on learning.
Parse, process, and plan before you do. Prioritize which tasks need completing first, based on the resources at hand and the complexity of the tasks. Use the scale of changes to determine timelines and the release of new versions and editions.
The possibilities of improvements, spinoffs, and adaptations are endless, but they don’t all need to be done by you alone. Reach out to the rest of the team!
- Project managers: coordinate and notify teams about similar projects, make connections between new and current collaborators, oversee projects through to completion
- Authors: implement changes, record them in the Version History
- Editors: prioritize work for future versions or editions, implement changes, record them in the Version History
- Adopters: assist with implementing changes, take charge of a spinoff project
- New collaborators: assist with implementing changes, take charge of a spinoff project
- Adapters: share improvements back to the original book, implement changes, lead new adaptation projects
Whether the changes you are working on are new, or were planned earlier in the project but never executed, keep the following in mind:
- Look for grammatical errors, broken links, and accessibility of formats.
- Find newly created OER repositories and submit your book for inclusion.
- Make small maintenance changes to the webbook anytime during the year.
- Only make larger additions or updates to the webbook and other formats during breaks in academic sessions.
- Look for trends or shifts in your discipline or subject area, and make updates that reflect and respond to them.
- List error reports and corrections publicly.
- Record larger changes, like edits, additions, updates, and expansions in the Version History.
- Indicate new versions by point increments (e.g., from version 1.2 to version 1.3) and new editions by whole number increases (e.g., from edition 1 to edition 2)
- Add ancillaries, new formats, and media—another type of improvement that moves beyond simple corrections.
- Contact the team and collaborators, including adopters, to help as needs arise.
- Set up clear communication pathways from the book and ancillaries, so new collaborators can reach out.
- Identify an interim project manager if you need to step away or share the workload.
- Always keep everyone informed about ongoing work and estimated timeframes for completion.
Part of what makes open textbooks important is the community building that goes hand-in-hand with their creation. This doesn’t stop when the book is released, so continue to gather people together as you plan updates, and encourage them to add to or modify the resource as it suits their needs.
Keep reading to learn more about maintaining and improving your open textbook.
Improvements and Maintenance Overview — Rebus Guide 2.0, Apurva Ashok & Zoe Wake Hyde
This part of The Rebus Guide to Publishing Open Textbooks (So Far) will take you through the ‘afterlife’ of your book, and its journey beyond use in classrooms. The release and adoption of your open textbook are big milestones worth celebrating, but they also mark the beginning of a new set of steps. As a living document, your book will continue to change and evolve, and so will your role as creator. Your efforts now shift to maintenance, updates, corrections, and the planning and coordination of future versions.
In this section of the Guide, we cover things like following up on errata reports, updating formats, more substantive improvements and additions, and more.
As in other sections, these suggestions are based on our experience with open textbook projects to date. If you have questions about this overview, or suggestions for what else we should include, please share them in the Rebus Community project home. This document is an evolving draft, and continually incorporates community feedback. We welcome your thoughts and contributions, including ways to improve the Guide overall.
Why care about your textbook beyond release?
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 of your efforts is complete, it’s important to remember that maintaining the book is important — to ensure its ongoing relevance and continued adoption.
Books, regardless of whether they are web-based or printed, need some amount of editorial attention to remain valuable resources. This maintenance includes gathering feedback from adopters and readers, which is 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.
A book that is not improved, updated, and maintained can be perceived as being ‘too old’ and ‘out-of-date’ very quickly and therefore not seriously considered as an option by educators seeking course materials. In a way, a book’s usefulness can depend on the amount of attention that it receives – as people see news of updates, changes, or improvements to the book, they will be more likely to peruse the book and use it in their course!
What Maintenance Entails
Maintaining an open textbook 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!)
If your resource is hosted on the web, part of the maintenance process should involve ensuring that it is still accessible in its web format along with other offline and editable formats. And to ensure maximum distribution, find out if any new OER repositories have been created since the book’s initial release, and then make sure you submit it for inclusion there.
Further down, we get into more detail about the timing, order, and significance of different type of maintenance revisions.
Improvements and Additions
While “maintenance” refers to smaller, ongoing changes to an open textbook, we call more significant changes to content “improvements and additions.” These are made at particular moments following the book’s release, unlike the more frequent and unscheduled corrections that are part of maintenance. These changes can be split into three categories:
- qualitative improvements to existing content
- quantitative additions to existing content
- disciplinary or thematic updates
Following adoption and classroom use of the book, you are bound to receive different forms of 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 should be.
These constitute opportunities for improving those parts of the resource, which should be done during this phase in the book’s life-cycle. Improvements can also be implemented based on feedback from reviewers—those issues that were not addressed during the initial creation of the book. It’s also critical in this phase to revisit and resolve outstanding accessibility issues, as well as new ones that have been identified as the book has been used.
During this stage, you can also make additions to the content. These may include 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 can also come in the form of ancillary materials, like slide decks, question banks, exercises, and other supplementary content. We go into more detail about ancillary materials in later sections of the Guide, so keep reading!
The last 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. It is particularly important to split out this category from improvements and additions, as it highlights how OER can be responsive to wider changes theory, discourse, and practice. For this part of the process, pay attention to these larger themes, including examples, case studies, language and terminology, methodologies that are cited, resource lists, and literature reviews.
All of these changes should be included in the book’s Version History, which serves as a record of the various changes, edits, additions, and updates that are made over time. Take a look at our version history template and adapt it as needed for your book.
Timing and Process
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 will be accessing the book in a variety of ways (on the web, in other digital formats like EPUB, PDF, MOBI, and as printed copies).
The upshot is that maintenance changes (correcting typos, broken links, etc.) are the only type of revisions we advise making during the school year, and these should only be made to the web-based version of the resource. Changes to the print version and other formats will need to wait for a pause in the academic year or until year-end, depending on how the in-school time is organized in your region. Each maintenance change does not need to be marked as a new edition of the book, nor does it 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 some example errata lists from OpenStax, along with examples of how to share these lists in printed PDF formats, and some inspirations for the errata form itself.
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 the 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 (more on this below). 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.
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). See an example of this in Media Innovation and Entrepreneurship.
Editions and 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, …) The release of a new edition is a time to rally more attention within and beyond your community, and perhaps some promotional efforts as well. If this is the case, do so strategically, and only if the revisions merit it. If there have only been subtle changes and updates, it may not warrant extensive promotion.
Releases of new editions can sometimes be disruptive, especially if they happen frequently (every year, for instance), as students might be working with older physical copies of the book that are more easily available and/or affordable. While one of the many advantages of publishing openly is the flexibility and ease of making changes, it is still important to be considerate towards ongoing users of the book, bearing in mind the impact that changes will have on them.
If you are working on a new edition of your book, be public about it, and communicate in advance with your team and adopters about the expected changes and updates. Doing so lets them know what is coming, and may even motivate some people to help you make these improvements. Once the changes have been completed, reach out and update everyone, pointing to the new edition and Version History that clearly outlines updates you have made.
Spinoffs and side projects
So far, we’ve only addressed updates and improvements to the core textbook, but there are other ways in which you may like to expand on your book. Ancillary materials like slide decks, question banks, instructor manuals, and student workbooks can supplement your resource and make it a more appealing package for adopters. You can begin work on these projects following the book’s release, or if you have the resources to do so, concurrent to the book’s production!
With the open license on your book, the different types of spinoffs are endless. For instance, translations, spelling conversions (eg.: American to British spelling), or cultural adjustments can make it accessible for use in more regions. Other adaptations, small or large, can make the text work better in different pedagogical contexts, or incorporate regionally specific content that makes it relevant to a different set of users, thus expanding the pool of readers around your book.
While adaptations mostly maintain consistency of the content, other variants like remixing can involve blending content from the book with other openly licensed content. For example, Blueprint for Success in College and Career remixes sections from four other OER: Foundations of Academic Success, A Different Road to College: A Guide for Transitioning Non-traditional Students, How to Learn Like a Pro!, and College Success.
Other ways to build on your book is to think of new formats and media through which to share content. You could create an audiobook version of the text, a series of short videos summarizing each unit, or a poster series that creates visualizations of the content. The possibilities are endless!
Who makes these changes?
As we’ve seen so far, there’s a lot that you can do to maintain and improve on your already carefully crafted open textbook! The main thing to keep in mind that all these improvements do not need to be made by you alone. In fact, it probably won’t and can’t all be done by you – and that’s a good thing. Part of what makes creating open textbooks important is the community building that goes hand in hand. This doesn’t stop with the book’s release, but continues during improvements and maintenance. Keep gathering people around the book during this phase, from adopters to adapters, so that both the book and the community can grow with time!
The first source of help for maintenance and improvements is the team and collaborators who were involved in creating the resource. Reach out to them as needs arise, and you may be surprised at their response! You can also reach out to the people who are using the book – adopters may well be very motivated to help make changes, as they are the ones who directly benefit from improvements to the book.
Simply put, any individual or organization invested in the value of the resource has an incentive to contribute to maintaining it and keeping it up-to-date in the long term. Depending on the type of project or work that is being done to improve or add to the book, you may even find funders willing to invest financially, or others who can secure budgets through institutional, local, or state grants.
For this to happen, it is vital that you have clear communications pathways set up from your book and its ancillaries. That way, anyone who is interested in contributing in some way knows how to contact you or another team member. And if you find that you need to step away from the project at some point, make sure you’ve identified and involved someone else to take over or manage things in the interim. Look to your leadership team for this, because there will likely be someone who is eager and willing to take on the mantle.
And lastly, do what you can to be public about the status of the book, of other projects, and of changes, even if it’s in the form of a short notice in the book or in your team’s public discussion space. Leave the possibilities for the book open – and watch eagerly how they unfurl!
Need further assistance?
We hope these suggestions will help you maintain your textbook and follow its life and journey around the world. We’ll continue to add to the Guide as we work with more projects, and we welcome your ideas on what else we might add, as well as your feedback on how these approaches have worked (or not!) for you.
If you have questions, or anything to add, please let us know in the Rebus Community project home.
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Feedback & Suggestions — Sample from Rebus Guide 2.0, Apurva Ashok & Zoe Wake Hyde
We are actively and enthusiastically soliciting feedback from instructors, faculty, administrators, OER program managers, librarians, instructional designers, students, and others using this book. You can leave feedback and suggestions in the Rebus Community project home at https://www.rebus.community/c/open-textbooks-in-development/the-rebus-guide-to-publishing.
Version History — Sample, from Rebus Guide 2.0, Apurva Ashok & Zoe Wake Hyde
This page provides a record of edits and changes made to this book since its initial publication. Whenever edits or updates are made in the text, we provide a record and description of those changes here. If the change is minor, the version number increases by 0.1. If the edits involve substantial updates, the edition number increases to the next whole number.
The files posted alongside this book always reflect the most recent version. If you find an error in this book, please let us know in the Rebus Community project home.
Version | Date | Change | Affected Web Page |
---|---|---|---|
1.0 | October 2018 | Original | |
2.0 | 30 September 2019 | Second edition published, with updated book information and metadata. It includes the following additions:
|
Entire book. |
30 September 2019 |
Following chapters or sections edited for typos, Canadian spelling, or updated for broken links and other information:
|
Entire book. |
Versioning History — Sample, BCcampus, Lauri M. Aesoph
This page provides a record of edits and changes made to this book since its initial publication in the B.C. Open Textbook Collection. Whenever edits or updates are made in the text, we provide a record and description of those changes here. If the change is minor, the version number increases by 0.01. If the edits involve substantial updates, the version number increases to the next full number.
The files posted by this book always reflect the most recent version. If you find an error in this book, please fill out the Report an Open Textbook Error form.
Version | Date | Change | Affected Web Page |
1.0 | February 20, 2018 | Added guide to B.C. Open Textbook Collection. | |
1.01 | May 2, 2018 | For all Open Textbook Network logo references, changed “Open Textbook Network” when referencing chapters to the guide title, “Authoring Open Textbooks.” | |
1.02 | August 23, 2018 | Correction: changed titles for contract templates to title-case. | Appendix 4 |
1.03 | September 25, 2018 | Embedded “What are Creative Commons Licenses?” video | Appendix 1 |
1.04 | October 17, 2018 | Removed references to Pressbooks Training webinars (discontinued Oct 10/18) and added info about Pressbooks Tutorial videos. |
|
1.05 | March 6, 2019 | Added Working Group Guide to list of BCcampus support resources, at bottom of page. Noted that the Accessibility Toolkit is now in its second edition. | Introduction |
1.06 | May 21, 2019 | Updated information on CC Search tool. | Resources: Search and Find |
1.07 | June 12, 2019 | Updated the theme. | Theme changed from Open Textbooks to Clarke. This affected the general look and feel of this book. |
1.08 | July 11, 2019 | Updated broken links.
Added Embedding and Linking chapter (new) |
Textbook Reviews |
1.09 | August 7, 2019 | Added agreement template for students wish to publish course work with a CC licence. | Appendix 4 |
1.10 | October 1, 2019 | ISBN for Print and eBook added. Versioning history number changed from 0.1 to 0.01. |
Adaptations
Adaptations Summary — Rebus Guide 2.0, Apurva Ashok & Zoe Wake Hyde
Adaptations mark the beginning of a new set of steps (and lives) for your open textbook. As people make substantial alterations to the resource, they create a stand-alone “fork” of it. This expands the potential reach and use of the book for new audiences, contexts, regions, and languages.
Adaptation is openness in action. It’s easier and more collectivist to create a new resource by building on one that already exists. The freedom to do so with open texts is distintinctive and rarely possible with conventional All Rights Reserved textbooks.
As open as possible and as closed as necessary. While there’s no single license that’s right for all creators, give back to the ecosystem by selecting the most permissive license that works for your project.
Boundless opportunities for customization. Adaptation projects can range from small-scale to very large in scope. In both cases, adapters should reshape the resource to fit their exact needs.
Modularity makes everything easier. A clear, consistent structure across your book, including a common template for each chapter, not only makes it better for learners, but also helps adapters swap in and out some elements of your text while keeping others in place.
Give what you get. Help grow the community of practice around the book with your adaptation, and do what’s needed to track adaptations, demonstrate the book’s impact, and maintain and improve the adaptation over time.
There are two sides to adaptation: one is setting up the original book so it can be easily adaptable, and the other is embarking on a new adaptation project. Many different people can be involved:
- Project manager: coordinates with new adapters and connects them with the team, tracks adaptations, collects corrections from adapters, encourages editorial and authoring teams to think about modular content
- Adopters: use new adaptations, start new adaptation projects
- Adapters: start new adaptation projects, submit changes back to the original book, join the community of practice, check permissions and licenses
- Authors: use new adaptations, create modular content, join adaptation projects
- Editors: check permissions and licensing, assist with the creation of modular content, join adaptation projects
- Reviewers: joins adaptation projects
- Marketing and communications: shares new adaptation projects, promotes demonstrable impact and success of adaptations
Creating an adaptation that stands alone from the original book (or setting out the pathway for others to do so) is no small feat, but you can get going with these suggestions:
- Select a license that is as permissive as possible.
- Make your book available in at least one editable format.
- Support modularity by referring to chapters by titles not numbers, and by keeping context-specific information separate from theory or concepts.
- Create a backmatter section that gives adapters a reference for content-specific information in your book, as well as permissions or licensing information of elements.
- Provide sample messaging for attribution, which adapters and adopters can use to give their thanks to you and your team.
- Request that adapters remove the attribution if you do not want to be associated with the adapted version.
- Track adaptations by asking adapters to self-report.
- Clearly indicate how adapters can connect with you and the community.
- Join forces and collaborate with others who are already underway with adaptation projects.
- Consult the backmatter sections of books for permissions and licensing information.
- Adopt a license that meets the features of the original book’s license, or consult with copyright librarians about fair-use or fair-dealing rules in your region.
- Define the differences between the adaptation and the original book, on the book’s homepage, in front matter, or in the metadata.
- Provide links from the original book to the adaptation and vice versa.
- Update the original creators about your adaptation project’s progress.
- Generate buzz around your book and community with the added value that an adaptation provides.
Ultimately, adaptations are a measure of the value of the book to its discipline, to educators, and to students. Stay proud of the opportunities that your open textbook creates, and use this kind of work to encourage more adoptions of the book and to boost your professional profile!
Keep reading to learn more about how to set up or create adaptations.
Adaptations Overview — Rebus Guide 2.0, Apurva Ashok & Zoe Wake Hyde
This final part of The Rebus Guide to Publishing Open Textbooks (So Far) takes you through the considerations around adapting an open textbook, including the benefits of adaptation, enabling adaptations, and other best practices. Like adoptions, adaptations also mark the beginning of a new set of steps (and new lives) for your open textbook.
As in other sections, these suggestions are based on our experience with open textbook projects to date. If you have questions about this overview, or suggestions for what else we should include, please share them in the Rebus Community project home. This document is an evolving draft, and continually incorporates community feedback. We welcome your thoughts and contributions, including ways to improve the Guide overall.
What is adaptation?
Broadly speaking, adaptation means making changes to an existing resource. Unlike creating a new open textbook, adaptation involves working with an existing text, and also relates to making more conceptual or substantial alterations to a book, so that it can better suit your needs as a teacher.
Adaptations can serve to localize the book to your specific region, to customize it for your class, to translate it for increased use, or to make the book accessible in a different format (e.g., an audiobook). All these instances involve creating a “project fork,” that is, another version of the text that can stand alone and separate from the original book or work. Accordingly, adaptations need to be maintained and updated on their own, in parallel to the way that the creators of the original work have to ensure their book’s upkeep and continued use.
Benefits of adaptation
Adaptations are a great demonstration of the advantages of open licenses that permit reuse, remixing, and redistribution. Because it is sometimes easier to create a new resource by building on content that already exists, openly licensed texts are invaluable.
Adaptation also allows content to be shaped to better suit a variety of needs, from those of instructors and students, to the requirements of universities and individual courses. This level of freedom is distinctive of open texts, and is rarely available with conventionally All Rights Reserved books, which carry more restrictions on reusing and remixing content.
Adaptation also presents an opportunity to improve on the text by correcting errors or changing insensitive content. For instance, if your textbook contained inappropriate content, you can immediately make corrections to the web version. Not only is it this simple, but you could do so without affecting other sections, chapters, images, etc. At the end of the academic semester, you can conveniently apply this change to all the other formats, including print.
One of the other major benefits of adaptation is that it represents an opportunity to generate additional value around the book. Because it is not a static or isolated process, it can be abuzz with communication, conversation, and collaboration, growing the community around the original book and allowing new people to discover its potential expansions!
Setting up for easier adaptation
If you’re creating an open textbook, there are a number of ways that you can structure it to enable others to easily adapt your work. (We’ve mentioned the following suggestions previously in this Guide, so don’t worry if you’re already near the end of your book’s creation.)
The first and possibly most important way to enable adaptation of your book is by choosing an open license. We encourage selecting a license that is as permissive as possible, understanding that there’s no single open license that works for all creators. Try to be as open as possible and as closed as necessary with the license on your work. Ultimately, the open publishing ecosystem is one in which everybody benefits from the work that we all put in: keep this in mind when it comes to your own project.
In a similar vein, make sure that your book is available in at least one editable format when released, so adapters can reuse and repurpose the content without too much difficulty. A variety of editable formats is even better, giving adapters more options when it comes to pulling content from the book and remixing it.
As you’re creating your content, try to do so in ways that make it modular. Part of this is to ensure that you have a clear and consistent structure across your book, so each chapter or unit follows a similar formula. Think about how units can be combined in different orders (that is, different from the one you have outlined yourself), or even stand alone and be used separate from the text. A simple way to assist future adapters of the text is to title and refer to chapters and units by name (not number). That way, if the adapter decides to reorder units, or only use some units, they are not bound by a numerical naming system. We also suggest that context-specific information, such as local examples, laws from your region of governance, statistics from your country or state organizations, etc., be modular, so that it too can be extracted from other content in the unit, to then be easily modified in the adaptation.
The back matter of your book is a good location to list places in the book that contain context-specific information, giving adapters quick reference. You can also clearly state permissions and licensing information here, including elements in the book that contain a license that is different from the book’s global license. This section can also contain a few lines of sample messaging for attribution, so adapters know how you and other creators would like to be attributed in the adapted work. This information can be helpful for adopters and adapters alike. Take a look at the Licensing & Remixing Information in Media Innovation and Entrepreneurship for an example.
Tracking adaptations
It can also prove helpful to keep track of the different adaptations that are made—those that you are aware of. While this can be hard to do, creating even a small list of projects that are using your book is a way for the book’s community to be aware of the work that is being done and possibly participate in it themselves! To help make this happen, give adapters clear pathways to contact you or the book’s community. If possible, also share pathways for adapters to submit changes back to the original book, in case they catch any errors as they making their adaptations.
Keeping track of adaptations is a good way to measure your book’s impact on the field, and in turn boost your professional profile. Just as you can track and communicate news about adoptions, adaptations are another measure of success.
Keeping an eye on adaptations is also useful if and when you come across a version that doesn’t sit well with you or the team. As the original creators, you have the right to be attributed on adaptations, but you can also request that adapters remove your attribution if you prefer not to be associated with their work. While we hope this is not a request you would have to make often, it can be applied if need be.
How to adapt an open textbook
If you find yourself on the other side of the equation, and are adapting an existing open textbook, we have some basic tips for you too. First, it’s always wise to check around to see if the type of adaptation you had in mind is already underway or completed. If you find that someone has started to create what you wanted, you can join forces and collaborate with them to avoid duplicating efforts. Even if no one is making a similar adaptation, putting out feelers for other adapters helps build community around the book.
Another practical step as you start out is to check the license of the book and make sure you have permission to adapt it in the way that you would like to. It’s also good to check the license of individual elements in the book, like multimedia elements, since these can sometimes be licensed differently that the book as a whole. If the creator has a back matter section listing the book’s permissions, licensing, and remixing information, be sure to consult it.
If you’re not able to determine the license on the book or an individual element, we recommend you assume an “All Rights Reserved” license. In this case, consult the fair use or fair dealing laws in your region. These govern reasonable reuse of portions of the book within an adaptation. If you need assistance, consult the copyright librarians at your institution, if present, or ask for help from the community of practitioners in the Rebus Community platform.
As an adapter, make sure you select a license that complies with the license on the original book. For instance, if the original work is licensed with the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike license (CC-BY-SA), you are obligated to also license your adaptation CC-BY-SA. Be sure to credit the original authors in your adaptation, using the suggested wording if it is available. It’s a nice gesture to also include a note in the front matter of your book, stating that your adaptation draws on one or more openly licensed books. See an example of this in the front matter of Blueprint for Success.
When it comes to doing the work of adapting, remember that it doesn’t just have to be you—you can form a team around the project and make this a collaborative effort! Reach back to the original creators, not only to let them know that you are working on this project, but to see if they or others on the team can help. Once this line of communication is established, you can use it to feed back any corrections to the original text, in the case that you come across errors.
You should also chat with the original creator to clearly define the differences between your adaptation and the original work. Of course, this is something you and your team may have already defined, early on. Make sure that these differences are stated clearly, either in the front matter of your book, or perhaps in the book’s description or metadata. That way, anyone coming across your book will also know whether the original work (or another adaptation) might work better for their course. From there, they can then make the appropriate comparisons of the book in a repository or referatory. You can also provide links back to the original work, so it is more easily discoverable. This might encourage the creators to also include links to your adaptation in the original book. You get what you give!
We also recommend taking a look at BCcampus Open Education’s Adaptation Guide for a more comprehensive guide to adapting an open textbook. And of course, take another look at the other sections of this Guide with adaptation in mind! The principles, examples, recommendations, and templates we provide have been written with a variety of projects in mind, so you can always refer to them as you move forward with adaptation.
Need further assistance?
We hope these suggestions will help, either as you make your book more easily adaptable or as you work to adapt an existing textbook. We’ll continue to add to the Guide as we work with more projects. In the meantime, we welcome your ideas on what else we might add, as well as your feedback on how these approaches have worked (or not!) for you.
If you have questions, or anything to add, please let us know in the Rebus Community project home.
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Textbook Reviews
Textbook Reviews — BCcampus, Lauri M. Aesoph
Giving faculty and students the opportunity to read reviews about your textbook adds to the book’s credibility. A textbook with many positive reviews will reassure instructors looking for an open textbook that their colleagues approve of it. The reviews will also help you improve the quality of your textbook. By reading reviews carefully, you will learn about reported errors and suggested improvements. Record errors that can be fixed immediately in your maintenance plan and note any suggestions for future editions of your textbook. (See Maintain the Book.)
Review rubric
Using an established set of questions — or rubric — yields consistent and comprehensive feedback from each individual who reviews your textbook. Several open-education organizations use the BCcampus Open Education Review Rubric [Word file] — an openly licensed document available to anyone to use or change. Feel free to use this rubric, either as is or customized to your needs, if you decide to solicit reviews once your textbook is finished. These are the topics it covers:
- Comprehensiveness
- Content accuracy
- Relevance and longevity
- Clarity
- Consistency
- Modularity
- Organization, structure, and flow
- Interface
- Grammatical and spelling errors
- Diversity and inclusion
- Book recommendation
Find reviewers
There are several ways to locate reviewers. However, before looking for candidates, think about how you will determine a reviewer’s qualifications. At BCcampus Open Education, we ask that reviewing faculty fill out an application form and describe their credentials for and experience in teaching the textbook’s subject. We also ask for a list of current courses they are teaching at a post-secondary institution in the textbook’s subject area.
Once this information has been received, our team confirms this data by searching for the reviewer in their university or college’s faculty directory. If the individual is not listed, we ask for confirmation of their position from the department chair or dean.
How you canvass for potential reviewers will depend on your discipline, home institution, and the resources available to you. One obvious method is to include a request for reviews wherever your textbook is posted. This might be in your institution’s library catalogue or on your department or faculty website. Information should include details such as reviewer qualifications, the review process, and payment for a completed review. If payment, even a small stipend, is not feasible, consider a barter arrangement with fellow open textbook authors in the same discipline. In other words, you offer to review their textbook in exchange for a review of yours.
Some collections, such as the Open Textbook Library [New Tab] and the B.C. Open Textbook Collection [New Tab], make it is a matter of course to gather reviews about books in their repositories. When you apply to add your book to a collection, ask if you may take a copy of the reviews generated for your textbook and place them in other spots where your textbook is posted. It is likely that these reviews, like the textbooks, are openly licensed. (See Communications.)
Procedure
Develop a procedure for processing reviews from beginning to end. For example, decide how reviewers should contact you with a request to review your book, whether it’s by email, an application form, or other. Create a system for receiving the completed review, tracking in-progress reviews, and posting reviews. Consider constructing templates and standard language that can be used for communicating with reviewers at each stage of the process.
Deadlines are important for both you and the reviewer. At BCcampus, reviewers are given a deadline of three months to finish. If they don’t, access to the review form expires and reapplication to review the book is required. It has been our experience that approximately half of all applicants complete reviews.
BCcampus Open Education follows standard procedures — including email templates — that provide efficient and consistent services to reviewers. The steps include:
- Posting a call for reviews to Review an Open Textbook [New Tab] on the BCcampus OpenEd website and by each textbook in the B.C. Open Textbook Collection [New Tab]
- Requiring that potential reviewers fill out an application [New Tab] to determine their eligibility
- Vetting all applications to confirm each reviewer’s qualifications
- Emailing each successful candidate a copy of the BCcampus Open Education Review Rubric [Word file], instructions, and the deadline
- Recording and monitoring all reviews at each stage of the process whether they are in progress, completed, or expired
- Sending a confirmation email to the reviewer once the completed review is submitted, then posting the review, and updating records
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- "Kurt Vonnegut Quotes," Goodreads, https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/276615-another-flaw-in-the-human-character-is-that-everybody-wants (accessed August 11, 2017). ↵