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Libraries & Cultural Resources

Research Guides

Open Education Alberta: OER Publishing Service

Open Education Alberta is a collaborative, no-fee publishing service utilizing Pressbooks for open textbooks and other book-like open educational resources available to post-secondary educators.

Measuring Your Impact

When planning an OER adoption, adaptation, or new creation project, it is useful to think about ways that you may express the project's impact. The ways you may measure this impact can vary depending on the focus of the impact, audience, and goals for sharing the impact.

For example, to explore the impact of OER adoption in a course for students through an affordability lens, you would likely consider the financial amount saved by students. But there may be other metrics of interest, such as student feedback on the OER or changes in student retention or success in the course.

If you are developing an OER, either as an adaptation or new creation, you may want to consider the reach and usage of the OER following publication. In which case, the platform or repository hosting the OER may have statistical functionality that you can use to assist in tracking impact data. For example, Open Education Alberta's Pressbooks platform gathers statistics including number of visitors, page views, and access points through the embedded Koko Analytics tool.

It is recommended to get started early in your OER project planning to identify the metrics you would like to track and for what purpose. These choices can help inform your decisions along the way.

Measuring Impact Resources

Open Education Alberta Service: Impact Metrics

Within the Pressbooks Platform

Open Education Alberta's Pressbooks OER publishing platform provides some valuable impact metrics through the embedded Koko Analytics tool, which is available to creators. Optionally, the analytics dashboard can be made publicly accessible.

An example of this is the Koko Analytics dashboard for the APA Style Citation Tutorial: 7, published through Open Education Alberta.

The Koko Analytics dashboard gathers data on: visitors, page views, referrers (i.e. how visitors connected to the OER), and level of traffic to "pages" in the OER. Data can be filtered to show data from "all time" or for specific date ranges.

Additional data is also available to creators upon request through the LCR OER Support Team. Data available includes total number of downloads, the number of downloads per format (ePub, PDF-print, PDF-digital, Pressbooks XML, etc.), and, if applicable, the number of times cloned (i.e. copied for adaptation).

All Open Education Alberta OER publications are indexed for discovery in the Pressbooks Directory. The staff at Pressbooks develop "curated collections" and periodically select published OER to add to highlight in these collections. Consider highlighting this in impact reporting if your OER is highlighted in one of Pressbooks' curated collections.

Additional Data Gathering Opportunities

Institutional Repositories

As part of the Open Education Alberta service, the LCR OER Support Team also assists in preservation and indexing activities for your OER to increase discovery and sustainability.

PRISM

The default repository used is PRISM, UCalgary's institutional repository. PRISM provides additional statistics and discovery point for static files of your OER, such as PDF and ePub files. Available statistics includes total visits, visits per month, file visits, top countries, and top cities. Materials added to the PRISM repository are also indexed within Google Scholar and LCR's library catalogue.

Digital Collections

LCR's Digital Collections repository may alternatively be used in cases where additional multimedia resources are development as part of the OER project, such as videos and images. This will be determined upon consultation with the LCR OER Support Team.

OER Repositories

Additional points of discovery and indexing is another option with the Open Education Alberta Service. The LCR OER Support Team can assist with indexing submission to appropriate OER repositories. Some of these repositories may have additional data gathering or feedback features that can be used to support impact reporting.

Typical OER repositories we will submit Open Education Alberta OER publications to include:

Additional OER repositories or discipline-specific repositories can also be considered.

Other Avenues

There may be additional options for ways to gather impact data, such as:

  • Additional platforms or repositories where an OER is shared for discovery
  • Informal feedback from others (in-person or online)
  • Responses and sharing via social media platforms 
  • Outreach (listservs, presentations - local and external, meetings, conferences, etc.)

Libraries & Cultural Resources