Peer review

Peer review is important because it is one way to verify that open educational resources are high quality and have been vetted by others in the field. It is a way of showing that OER development is a valid scholarly pursuit.

COERLL doesn't have any specific process or criteria for a peer reviewer of language learning materials to follow. We recommend that creators come up with their own process and find their own peer reviewers among their community of language educator colleagues. You may also want to turn to professional networks to find peer reviewers.

Apurva Ashok and Zoe Wake Hyde of the REBUS Community have published an excellent Rebus Guide to Publishing Open Textbooks (So Far), with a chapter on the peer review process (this guide is licensed under a CC BY license).

Examples

COERLL has developed a rubric for OER for language learning (Google Docs), which you may copy and reuse for your own projects
The University of Minnesota's Open Textbook Library list of peer review criteria, and a review based on that criteria

For COERLL sponsored projects, please choose three potential peer reviewers at the beginning of the project and consider at what point in the process you want them to review your work.

▹▹▹ Read more on page: Sharing Your Materials

Student feedback

It is essential that the materials you create are appropriate for your students. There are many ways to get students' feedback, including through surveys, focus groups, or informal teaching sessions.

Examples

Arley Cruthers, author of "Business Writing for Everyone", gave her students the option to either audit her textbook or remix the class' final project. She describes the process in this series of tweets.
Sonia Balasch, co-author of "Español y Cultura en Perspectiva", asks her students for suggestions of content to add to the course readings as part of the course evaluation.
Ignacio Carvajal, co-author of "Chqe’tamaj le qach’ab’al K’iche’!" and Josefrayn Sanchez-Perry, co-author of Nahuatlahtolli, each taught with their materials in an informal class, before bringing them into the classroom.

Learn More about Review

Check Your Knowledge

Would you prefer to have your work peer reviewed before it has been published, so that reviews can be taken into account, or after it has been published, so that you can show people have looked at the finished product?

What criteria might you want your peer reviewers to evaluate?

Please provide feedback on these modules by filling out this short survey.

Go to the next page to learn how to publish a print-on-demand textbook.