26 Monitoring Feedback
Once students, educators and community members start using your open text, you will likely start receiving feedback about its content. For example, students may find a particular unit or chapter hard to understand, or instructors may feel your open text could benefit from additional case studies or exercises.
Feedback provides an opportunity for you to improve your open text, including identifying:
- typos and grammatical errors
- broken links
- accessibility issues
- areas where your open text could be more inclusive and diverse.
Collect User Feedback
It’s a good idea to encourage readers to offer feedback about your open text. You can do this by adding a line to the preface or introduction that invites corrections or suggestions to the Open Education contact form.
Gather Student Feedback
Gathering student feedback is a valuable endeavour. You can survey your students with questions related to the content of your open text or about open texts and open education more broadly. Here are some questions you could survey students on:
- Have you used [insert text title] throughout your studies?
- If you did not use [insert text title], why?
- How often did you access [insert text title]?
- How useful was [insert text title] to your study?
- Did you use the interactive activities/supplementary material embedded in the text?
- What are your thoughts about a free online textbook?
- What did you enjoy about [insert text title]?
- What did you dislike about [insert text title]?
- Did you save money using the open text?
- Do you prefer online textbooks or published printed text?
- If you used [insert text title] for your studies, how likely are you to use it in your other subjects?
- How likely are you to share/recommend [insert text title] to friends and other students?
- How likely are you to use open texts for future courses/study?
- What features would you like in a second edition of [insert text title]?
More example surveys for students can be found in the OER Research Toolkit.
Please remember that if you’re planning to publish student data you will need ethics approval.
Chapter Attribution
This chapter has been adapted in parts from:
Open Publishing Guide for Authors by University of Southern Queensland. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
