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 with a contact email address
• adding a feedback page to the front or back matter of your open text (see this example in the Australian Handbook for Careers in Psychological Science)
• using an external annotation tool (such as Hypothes.is)
• allowing readers to submit reviews after publication (for example, reviewing it in the Open Textbook Library).

Monitor Reviews

If your text is accepted into the Open Textbook Library, members of the Open Education Network may leave reviews for your text. These reviews are rated from one to five stars and are based on the following criteria:

• comprehensiveness
• content accuracy
• relevance/longevity
• clarity
• consistency
• modularity
• organisation/structure/flow
• interface
• grammatical errors
• cultural relevance.

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.

Chapter Attribution

This chapter has been adapted in parts from:

• ‘Gather User Feedback’ in Open Educational Resources Collective Publishing Workflow by Council of Australian University Librarians, licensed under a CC BY 4.0 licence.