Open Educational Resources (OER)

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.

Open Education Alberta's Pressbooks OER publishing platform provides some valuable impact metrics through the embedded Koko Analytics tool. 

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