In 2018, the University of Washington Libraries began a pilot of Pressbooks to meet the demand for an OER publishing platform that would allow faculty to easily create and remix affordable and openly licensed course materials. Over four years, use of the platform grew steadily, and instructors sought support from the Open Education Librarian and Graduate Assistant for publishing open course materials and open pedagogy projects. In 2022, we developed a survey in Qualtrics to get a handle on our growing network of Pressbooks users and their motivations for starting their Pressbooks projects. Questions were developed to understand users' roles at the university, to clarify how they were using the platform, and to identify the kinds of support authors needed going forward. Developing our 2022 UW Libraries Pressbooks user survey involved considerable planning in partnership with our Libraries Assessment team, and the survey underwent many revisions before it was launched.
In this presentation, we'll discuss how we undertook this assessment and decided on methodology, share our findings, explore challenges we encountered, and discuss changes to our OER program based on survey responses. This project coincided with efforts to better manage users on our platform, and we'll also talk about how we made decisions about the long-term management and sustainability of our Pressbooks platform. Our session will invite attendees to consider key questions regarding the use of open publishing platforms at their institution, how they might use their findings, and how that aligns with their institution's strategic goals before embarking on an assessment. While our project focused on Pressbooks and used Qualtrics for survey distribution, our session will speak to assessment methodologies that can be used for any OER publishing platform and will be relevant for those without an institution-supported survey platform. This session will help others gather actionable data on their OER publishing efforts, regardless of platform, to support decision making and improvements for faculty and students.
By attending this session, attendees will be able to:- Identify steps for undertaking a successful assessment of an OER publishing platform at their institution
- Revise and adapt openly licensed survey questions created by staff at the University of Washington
- Gather ideas for sustainably managing users and books on OER publishing platforms
