Richard White.
Cake02_Reed © 2017 Michelle Reed CC BY SA 2.0
The author has no affiliation with the institution named on the cake.
Leap of faith into the open
When you put an open educational resource (OER) out into the world, you’re making a leap of faith. Your name is on it, but you’re also saying to the reader, take it, adapt it, make it work for you. In one sense the faith you’re placing in your reader is that they’ll continue to attribute you (the legal aspects of the open licence) but you’re also surrendering control of something you put hours and hours into making.
In late 2013 a small team of academics from half a dozen universities across Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand “hacked” a book in a weekend, which we named Media Studies 101. I was involved on the project steering group and as copyright adviser. We’d managed to secure some funding from Creative Commons HQ, which we spent on having a proper project manager, who made sure meetings were scheduled, the tech was sorted and deadlines were met.
When I say the book was written in one weekend, that’s largely true in terms of the writing and reviewing but we’d agreed on chapters beforehand, based on each others’ curricula. The chief goal was to make a media studies text that was both free and grounded in our own cultural context in Aotearoa, Australia and the South Pacific.
While I have kept an eye on its progress over that time, now that 10 years have gone by I thought it would be interesting to see where it’s gone. The question was: how do I find that out?
An unexpected journey
There is one thing we do have complete control over and that’s the original platform on which we published it. We had used WordPress, which has basic analytics built in. How much has it been used?
WordPress analytics for Media Studies 101 by year from 2014-2024
It has been used a lot. From our WordPress analytics, over time you can see it grew in popularity and peaked over 2017-19. It had over 100,000 pageviews in 2017 alone and, over the whole 10-year period, had 247,835 visitors and 572,320 pageviews. From “referrer” analytics (i.e. the site the reader clicked on a link to reach the book), we can tell it was prescribed at certain institutions, somewhat ironically, mostly in North America, the cultural context we were trying to supplant! Use has trailed off since then, perhaps indicating that the work is losing currency and newer resources are available.
The analytics also show the month that people were reading.
WordPress analytics for Media Studies 101 by month from 2014-2024
The darker patches in the figure may suggest use in the early parts of semesters in both the northern and southern hemispheres (September/October and March/April respectively). The analytics by page tell us that a couple of chapters are heavily used; some see very little use. In case you’re wondering, “Analysing Texts: Media and Theory” is the most popular topic. If I really want to, I can drill down and see that, say, the chapter on semiotics was read by hundreds of students at Ryerson University in 2017 and 2018.
Seeds scattered in the wind
But this only gives us a picture of our copy of the book. It was CC BY, so can I tell where else has it been copied or used? There isn’t a centralised system for OERs, so I tried various methods.
- I searched for title/author
- I searched by ISBN
- I searched OER indexing sites
- I searched Open Syllabus
- I searched using AI chatbots
Through basic web searches, I located one copy in the BC Campus Collection. I knew about this copy because BC Campus had seen a tweet about our project and asked if we could give them an exported .xml version, which they could easily import. Web searches also turned up accessible format copies in our institutional repository – I had forgotten we had done this! – showing 25,000 downloads. It was listed in a few of the main OER indexing sites, including Open Textbook Library and Merlot. These were not copies, just metadata that linked out to our WordPress or the BC Campus copy. There were a couple of other copies floating around but on sites that had no reviews or stats.
This was all very manual and still didn’t tell me a lot about actual usage or inclusion in reading lists. Unfortunately, it hadn’t shown up in Open Syllabus at all, which relies on scraping information from public web pages. I contacted BC Campus and they kindly supplied me with a spreadsheet of recent stats, which showed about 300 unique visitors a day. Perhaps the richest information about usage came from reviews on BC Campus and Open Textbook Library. These named actual colleges and universities – even the teachers themselves – that had used the book and what they thought of it.
So, going open – letting go – means you can’t necessarily picture what happened to your work, or at least that you have to do quite a bit of digging to form a fragmentary image. As far as I have been able to tell, the work didn’t spawn any adaptations. But then, how would I tell? Regardless, we can be very happy that a weekend’s work had so much value for a lot of teachers and students.
Lessons? We did get an ISBN but if we did this again I’d also go for chapter-level DOIs to be able to track things or enable the machines to do so more easily. We didn’t investigate getting it into the Directory of Open Access Books either. And, one final important recommendation: if you’re going to do web searches looking for something later, don’t give your book a terribly generic title like “Academic Subject 101”…
Richard White is the Manager Copyright & Open Access | Kaiwhakahaere, Manatārua me te Whakawāteataka at Otago University, Aotearoa New Zealand.