Research Guides: OER Publishing Resources: Assessment and Impact Tracking

Student Review

ACCA Student Assessment Form Template
Created for the ACCA program but adaptable to any OER project, this template includes questions on how often the student used the resource, ease of navigation, whether or not the resource represented a diversity of people and experiences, whether the content was clear, relevant, and aligned with course lectures, tests, and quizzes. It’s also valuable to ask students for their impressions of how much the resource contributed to their learning.
OER Assessment Toolkit
Created by the University of Texas at Austin, this toolkit provides an in-depth look at different course measures and how to craft an assessment instrument. It also contains examples of qualitative and quantitative assessments of resources in various courses.

Faculty Review

Review criteria used by the Open Textbook Library
The Open Textbook Library review criteria cover 10 areas: Comprehensiveness, Content Accuracy, Relevance/Longevity, Clarity, Consistency, Modularity, Organization, Structure, and Flow, Interface, Grammatical Errors, and Cultural Relevance.
MERLOT Peer Review Report Form – V 17.6
MERLOT is an OER publisher with a formal peer review process, for which this form is used. However, it is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA, so it can be reused and remixed to fit your project’s needs. That rubric has guiding questions for ranking in the following areas: Quality of Content, Potential Effectiveness as a Teaching Tool, and Ease of Use.
Achieve OER Rubrics
These rubrics are used by OER Commons, a major OER repository, to allow reviewers to evaluate resources on their platform.

Impact Tracking

Cost savings is often an important part of calculating the impact of your resource. Cost savings, or cost avoidance, is the amount of money students will avoid spending by using your OER instead of a commercial textbook.

To calculate cost savings, you will need to know:

The number of sections using the resource
The number of students enrolled in those sections. Alternately, the number of students enrolled can replace these first two numbers.
The cost of the textbook that the OER originally replaced. Most often, the cost of purchasing a new book from the bookstore, or the list price on Amazon, is used. Some in the OER community use $100 as a standard amount for savings to account for the fact that even though a book might cost more than that, not all students would have purchased the title.

Cost Savings for 1 semester = (number of sections) x (average number of students per section) x (cost of book being replaced).

You can add up each semester's savings for cumulative savings over time.

In addition to tracking cost savings, you might want to explore other areas of impact tracking and assessment using the resources below:

Guidebook to Research on Open Educational Resource Adoption
A guide to assessment of OER adoption from the Open Education Group, including its impact on cost, student outcomes, use of resources, and perceptions of OER.
OER Research Toolkit
The OER Research Toolkit is provided by the Open Education Group. It contains the OER Research Guidebook as well as numerous sample surveys from previous studies and data collection methods.
Student PIRGs Textbooks Research
Since the early 2000s, the Student PIRGs have been researching the textbook marketplace and the role of students in that marketplace. Their research has been used by policymakers, student leaders, and campus administrators to create textbook affordability programs across the country. This site contains a chronological list of the reports and research the Student PIRGs has published on textbooks.