The Open Choice Review Template

For OER to succeed as alternatives to commercially produced materials, they must be of a quality equal to or better than these competing works, sufficiently so as to win the trust of instructors in the field.

Posted on July 1, 2018 in Publisher Editorial

Regular readers of this column (surely there are some) will remember that a few months back I mentioned a new project currently under development at Choice, a discovery and evaluation service devoted to open educational resources. As it is currently planned, the service will enable instructors, librarians, instructional designers, and others to rapidly locate and assess these resources on both the individual resource and the course level. This new database, provisionally called Open Choice, will contain features that make it quite distinct from either Choice Reviews or ccAdvisor, principally by the addition of a “social” layer, allowing instructors and librarians to comment on and recommend specific resources or resource configurations.

Here at Choice, we have a long history of evaluating scholarly resources. As many of you know, our editors examine some 25,000 monographs a year, and we send almost 6,000 of them out for formal review. You can do the math for yourself to estimate the number of works we have scrutinized in the past half century. The criteria we use for evaluating and reviewing these works are thus the product of extensive experience, and we feel uniquely qualified in the areas of discovery, evaluation, and recommendation as a result. But our review criteria formally exclude textbooks (on much the same grounds as, traditionally, you did not acquire them for your library), and Choice reviews themselves are quite brief.

So when it comes to evaluating open educational resources, among which textbooks figure prominently, there is a whole array of issues not typically associated with monographs that must be considered. These include pedagogy, scope and sequence, license and copyright, adaptability, accessibility, interface design, and so forth. As a result, Open Choice reviews will be considerably longer and more granular than those in Choice Reviews. There is another difference, however, between evaluating a monograph and reviewing an OER. When we evaluate a monograph we are evaluating a single work, one of many published in that field, in that year. When we evaluate an OER, by comparison, we are aware of an additional responsibility: evaluating—and ultimately ensuring—the quality of an entire class of materials.

Why is that? By their very nature, open educational resources are created under a variety of conditions and are not necessarily exposed to the critical processes of peer review and editorial intervention required of their commercial cousins. For OER to succeed as alternatives to commercially produced materials, they must be of a quality equal to or better than these competing works, sufficiently so as to win the trust of instructors in the field. And for that to happen, these works need to be rigorously reviewed so as to ensure a continuous process of refinement and improvement, where warranted. In support of that goal we have created a detailed review template and an associated scoring system for our reviewers. But the template itself needs rigorous review, and so during these early months we are inviting you to perform this critical task for us. The template can be found here. In the spirit of open education, I invite you to take a few moments to read and comment on what you see there. Thanks!—MC

About the author:

Mark Cummings is the editor and publisher at Choice

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