OER Workflow

Conduct background research to ensure that you select or acquire the platform that best matches your needs:

• Purpose: Identify the main overriding purpose(s) of your Open Education Resource and the most appropriate corresponding format.

  • • This could be a mixed-format graphically polished book

    • This could be an openly accessible front end to an app, with an openly accessible back-end

    • This could be a podcast or a video series (or a YouTube channel)

    • This could be a research data set from ORDA

    • This could be an open learning resource, authored in Xerte or Google Sites

    • Identify restrictions (e.g. commercial sensitivity) to sharing that may limit the extent to which a resource may be open and agree an appropriate licence with any partners

    • Audience: consider who your resource is for: future / present University of Sheffield students; industry; other university students; other university staff

• Openness: Decide how open you want your resources to be: all lecture content + quizzes + videos, etc

• Review: The availability of related open resources; determine whether one or more of these (book, code, video...) may be adapted for your purposes (see Use and adapt another person's work)

• Fitness: Identify the criteria against which to judge the fitness for purpose of alternative OER tools. Examples may include:

  • • For books: Availability of platform within host institution // match to purpose(s) // ease of use // availability and usefulness of analystics // ease of review and revision

    • For apps:  availability and/or cost of front end // ease of use // availability and/or cost of hosting // analytics // ease of revision

    • For code (back end):  availability and ease with which code can be shared and versions controlled

    • Audio-visual: similar to the above: availability, ease of use, logging feedback (if possible)

• Assess: Identify alternative platforms and assess according to fitness criteria. Also consider where support for platforms is available within your institution. 

• Select: Choose the platform that best meets the fitness criteria. See Tools & hosting platforms 

• Acquire: If not already available within host institution, access funding (if applicable) and acquire the chosen platform

Discuss your OER proposal with your Director of Education:

• Ensure it fits with departmental / school priorities for education. 

• Assess, with your Director of Education, if there is any inherent risk (either risk of injury if instructions are not followed correctly, or reputational risk to the University) following the University’s broad approach to risk and the staff code of conduct. 

• Seek legal advice for anything you think is high risk. The University has access to legal services and you can get a free initial 30 minute consultation (see https://staff.sheffield.ac.uk/uso/legal-services-panel#free-advice)

Gain the skills, knowledge and resources to enable you to effectively developed your OER:

• Familiarise yourself with OER principles: education resources that are openly accessible, the extent depending upon the chosen licence agreement

• Train: Access training resources in the use of the acquired OER platform

  • • This could be a course delivered by a dedicated training provider

    • This could be a self-taught initiative based on published training material / guidebooks

    • An effective method of training is to implement the entire workflow for a sample of the envisioned resource, or a dummy use case

• Understand the pros and contras of alternative forms of Creative Commons (or MIT for software or other) licence and their corresponding restrictions (if any).  See Licensing

  • • This could be GTA support for the preparation of graphical content and/or obtaining permission to use 3rd party material

    • This could be for the purchase of software development platforms and/or web hosting services

• Recruit collaborators, if appropriate, to provide skills and knowledge to complement your own with a view to developing and maintaining a comprehensive open education resource.

• Plan the structure and outline content of your OER

  • • This could be an extended contents list in the case of a book, complemented with a style guide

    • This could be identification of classes and/or functions, types of input and output in the case of a software resource

• Assign roles to collaborators (if necessary), manage their expectations and coordinate delivery

• Choose and adapt an appropriate licence. See Licensing

Develop the content of your OER:

• Develop the content of your OER, based on the structure defined during the preparation phase

• If a collaborative endeavour, coordinate the delivery of third party content and ensure a consistent style

• Develop or coordinate (e.g. with GTA support) the preparation of suitable graphical / multimedia content

• Determine whether published content may be reused within the terms of the licence agreement or whether permission to reproduce is needed; acquire this permission, keep a record of permissions, use this log template to keep track.

• If the OER platform / technology being used has analytics capability, ensure that this is suitably configured; otherwise consider embedding third party analytics technology

Finesse the look and feel of your OER, ensuring that it is complete, polished and easily extendible; (note that this finessing is intended to be undertaken by the authoring team for the authoring team, prior to external peer review):

• Carefully design the look and feel of your OER

  • • Books: choose and implement an appropriate style guide; create book covers; create other front and/or back matter (incl. about the author, testimonials, etc)

    • Software: ensure inputs are provided in a user-friendly manner and that any errors and handled; ensure that outputs are attractive and readily interpretable; implement (written, video) tutorials

    • Slides: initial slide(s) and/or template

    • Website: a suitable banner; whether a content management system needs to be followed (or opted out from)

• Ensure the design is compliant with University style (if applicable)

• Implement this design utilising your chosen development platform

• Check for errors and inaccuracies prior to public release and ensure that material such as instructions, protocols, etc, is thoroughly tested. Retain all documentation relating to testing.

• Prior to independent peer review, thoroughly check your content for consistency, completeness and correctness (proofreading and editing)

• Ensure you have got permission to use any third party material, where appropriate, and that you have assigned a licence. Keep a record of the permission you receive and use this log to keep track. See Licensing 

• Ensure that the material, in its eventual published form, will be universally accessible (if possible)

Solicit peers to independently review the content and usability of your OER, ammending and extending as necessary:

• Solicit peer reviewers (preferentially from experts external to the host institution) to review and evaluate the OER for consistency, completeness and correctness 

• In parallel, consider trialling the deployment of your OER with a cohort of students, to evaluate your OER for its suitability for your target educational audience

• Where possible, use online tools to document the peer review feedback - make sure you retain emails or copies of (e.g. marked-up) documents from your peer reviewers

• Based on peer review feedback, finesse the OER for for consistency, completeness and correctness

• Where suggestions are beyond the scope of the current version of the OER, archive for implementation in a future version

• Complete one final check (proof-reading) to ensure readiness for publication

• Consider soliciting testimonials from independent experts

• Acknowledge those that have contributed to the peer review process (perhaps noting that any remaining errors / misconceptions are those of the author(s) alone) 

Release your OER to the public, monitor usage analytics and establish mechanisms to gather continuous feedback (completeness, correctness and understandability) :

• Assign the drafted licence to the OER. See Licensing. 

  • Creative Commons licences, Section 5 (example here), seek to limit liabilities and therefore it is essential that licences are clearly displayed so that users can read and understand the terms of use. Make the licence visible, ensure there is a link to it, and add a plain text explanation. Example: This work is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Licence, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. 

  • GitHub provides guidance for displaying licence information effectively in GitHub repositories

• In the case of software, ensure that the URL of the landing page is simple and convenient to use; ensure that a mechanism is in place to cover any hosting charges

• In the case of a book, consider having a DOI or ISBN

• In all cases, ensure adequate metadata is in place to help people discover your work (e.g. subject headings or keywords, publication date, licence)

• Make the OER publicly available (e.g. that global privacy is set to public in the case of Pressbooks)

• For high risk material, consider adding your work to the University’s licensing portal which enables you to put additional measures in place (for example forcing someone to acknowledge they have read and accepted the terms and conditions prior to downloading a work). The portal also enables the University to keep a record of who has downloaded your work. 

• Develop a communications strategy and plan (contact disciplinary networks, news pages, social media channels)

• Implement your communications strategy

• If appropriate, upload a version of the OER to a repository, either an institutional one or subject one

• Ensure a record of the OER is available via MyPublications (UoS only)

Based on the acquired feedback (or in response to your own strategy to progressively enhance the breadth/depth of your resource), enhance, update and extend your OER as appropriate. Release (and manage) updates to the public at suitable discrete time intervals:

• Configure analytics tools and monitor usage statistics for the OER and its component parts

• Develop and implement a mechanism to systematically capture user feedback, such as a link to a Google form 

• Invite visitors to the OER to provide this feedback (including why they use it and what impact it has had), including suggestions for additional content in a future revision

• At suitable discrete points in time, revise the OER content in response to feedback; as well as to evolve scope and depth of the OER content, publish updates and revisions (including errata) at suitable points in time (e.g. annual, or biennially)

• Acknowledge contributions made to providers of feedback

• Consider the conditions under which an OER may be retired (e.g. due to becoming out-dated, superseded or due to staff departure) or be migrated