Releasing your OER is an exciting milestone, but it’s not the end of the publishing process. To ensure your OER remains a valuable resource, you’ll need to maintain, improve and update it on a regular basis. Otherwise, just as with commercial resources, it may become outdated, and stop being used and adopted.
Many OER aren’t changed – at least the original versions – once they’ve been published. Instructors who adopt an OER might customise it for their own use and maintain a private copy, but the open community doesn’t benefit from these improvements.
The most successful OER – as in those with the highest adoption rates – are the ones that receive ongoing editorial attention from their authors, including:
Maintenance, improvements and updates can be based on:
Once you’ve published your OER, your focus should shift from creation to:
You’ll need to decide how your OER will be maintained after release, including:
Maintenance tasks are usually prioritised based on:
Changes to your OER after release should be planned out in advance and scheduled for different times of the year, depending on their scope. For example:
Developing a maintenance schedule for your OER can help you:
The maintenance schedule for your OER should include a process and timetable for all the tasks you’ll need to complete to keep your OER relevant and current, including:
As you’re planning out these tasks and their timeline, you’ll also need to consider who should make these changes and assign them to the right people.
Everyone invested in the value of your OER has an incentive to contribute to maintaining it and keeping it up to date. Adopters are often motivated to help make changes since they benefit from improvements to the OER.
It’s beneficial to draw on the expertise of your authoring and publishing teams, as well as your readers when maintaining and making improvements to your OER. Some of the people who may be involved in identifying and making improvements:
It’s important to set up clear communications pathways from the OER and ancillaries so potential new collaborators can reach out. This will also ensure anyone interested in making suggestions or error reports or contributing content knows how to contact you.
Improvements and additions are significant, scheduled changes to content. These may include:
Improvements and additions – including planning, creating and releasing new versions and editions – are discussed in more detail in Manage Editions.
One of the most common post-release additions to OER are ancillary materials. Ancillaries can supplement your OER’s content and make it more appealing to adopters. Lack of ancillary materials is one of the most frequently cited reasons instructors decide not to adopt an OER. Ancillaries can be:
You can develop ancillaries alongside your OER or following your OER's release. Some instructors assign ancillary creation to their students, which is an example of open pedagogy.
H5P is a useful tool for creating ancillaries for OER. If you’re using Pressbooks, it includes a plugin for creating quizzes and interactive activities with H5P.
In addition to revising or expanding your OER, you may want to expand your readership by adapting it for different educational contents. Common adaptations include:
While adaptations mostly maintain consistency of the content, other variants like remixing can involve blending content from the OER with other openly-licensed content. For example, the Rebus Community’s Blueprint for Success in College and Career remixes sections from four other open textbooks – A Different Road to College: A Guide for Transitioning Non-Traditional Students, How to Learn Like a Pro! and College Success.
You can inform readers of changes to your OER by adding a version history to the back matter. This will serve as a record of changes made over the life of the OER.
You don’t need to include every change in the version history (e.g. fixing typos and broken links), but larger changes should be recorded. This includes:
You can indicate new versions by point increments (e.g., from version 1.2 to version 1.3) and new editions by whole number increases (e.g., from edition 1 to edition 2).
For example:
This page provides a record of edits and changes made to this resource since its initial publication. Whenever edits or updates, we provide a record and description of those changes here. If the change is minor, the version number increases by 0.1. If the changes involve substantial updates, the edition number increases to the next whole number.
The files posted alongside this book always reflect the most recent version. If you find an error in this book, please let us know at [email].
| Version | Date | Change |
|---|---|---|
| 1.0 | [Day/ Month Year] |
Original book published |
| 2.0 | [Day/ Month/ Year] |
[Describe and list changes. e.g. Second edition published, with updated book information and metadata. It includes the following additions:
|
Example version history templates:
Example version histories:
Adapted from:
‘Maintain the Book’ in Self-Publishing Guide by Lauri M. Aesoph, licensed under a CC BY 4.0 licence.
‘Ancillaries’ in Open Textbook Publishing Orientation (PUB 101) by Open Education Network, licensed under a CC BY 4.0 licence.
‘Improvements and Maintenance Summary’, ‘Improvements and Maintenance Overview’ and ‘Version History’ in The Rebus Guide to Publishing Open Textbooks (So Far) by Apurva Ashok and Zoe Wake Hyde, licensed under a CC BY 4.0 licence.