Errata Improvements
The Context
Users of OpenStax textbooks can submit errata (errors) for our books. This is a huge selling point for our users as we are one of the few, or perhaps the only, major publisher to accept errata and be transparent about our changes to our books. When I was Assistant Director of Content Development, I lead a team of Content Managers who were responsible for processing the errata.
The Challenge
As our library grew, it was imperative to make sure the form we were using was getting the right information for errors. We also wanted to make sure that the Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) that we hired to help us determine a solution could also understand the errors and tell us what the fixes would be.
The Approach
I first did some research to see what other publishers or organizations might be doing with error forms. I made a list of key differences and why I thought they might’ve approached it in that way. For example, a title published by Berkeley only had a simple Google Form (since creating your own tool might be costly) but embedded the results so that people can see the status of their submission and had verbiage to encourage users to check for duplicates. The results of the research gave us ideas for how to word our form and gave a little confidence boost since a lot of people were not investing in an errata tool!
I also talked to my Content Managers and our editorial vendors (the folks who contract SMEs) to identify pain points and to document their workflow.
I then identified and defined problems and separated them into content/form changes, back-end fixes, front-end fixes, and more complicated pie-in-the-sky type changes.
Results
We were able to change error types and error counts for better reporting.
We were also able to implement something in the tool that could at least pull in the Table of Contents for each title. This solved the issue of users not reporting clear locations and locations having inconsistent formatting.
With these small changes and changes to the copy to be more detailed (“Describe your error.” vs “Tell us in detail about the error and your suggestion.”), we were able to reduce the number of vague or irrelevant submissions. It was more clear that this was for content or pedagogical errors and not technical errors.
We also changed the CTA on our courseware from “Report an error” to “Suggest a correction” on assessments to deter students from reporting common technical errors to the errata form.