Phase One Session Eight Recap: Preparing for Phase Two

Textbook Success Program June 2024 Cohort
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Congratulations @june24-cohort! We’ve completed an important milestone in working through Phase 1. Below is a recap of our final Phase 1 session along with some information about Phase 2.

Key Links:

Session 8 helped emphasise the importance of authoring and editing logistics because a carefully planned transparent workflow can help your teams move through this stage smoothly.

You can guide your collaborators in their writing and editing efforts by adapting the following documents to fit the purpose of your OER project.

  1. First, a clearly defined author guide [linked above] will help your authors create content with accessibility, equity, and open pedagogy in mind.
  2. Second, a content tracking sheet will help gather content items in an organised manner.

We also briefly mentioned Author Agreements (MOUs) as documents that could help clarify expectations for members in larger teams or instances when smaller teams work with people whom they haven’t collaborated with before. See your handout [linked above] for more information.

Writing a sample chapter can be especially helpful for projects with more than one contributing author because it does a variety of things for your collaborators:

  1. It conveys the desired tone and style(s) of your writing. Seeing an example of a well-executed idea or chapter can help other authors with their drafts!
  2. It determines the desired sequence of textual and non-textual elements in the chapters. This is a chance for you all to test the chapter structure you worked on last week!
  3. It demonstrates your standards for accessibility and inclusive, culturally relevant materials.

In the second part of our session, we talked about editing, which is important in that it gives your OER structure and appeal and thereby significantly impacts how useful it is for learners. The editing process (both substantial edits and copyediting) can benefit from the diverse perspectives in your teams, putting you in a position to push for the changes that place equity and inclusion at the core of your work.

Since there is no “one size fits all approach” to editing workflows, you can determine your teams’ approach by considering the following:

  1. Editing needs time, so plan for it. Be intentional with your time and energy by avoiding too many phases of passing content back and forth between team members.
  2. Be sure to foreground exactly what type of feedback you are looking for. It’s okay to be directive here and provide a list and/ or style sheet that lays out what exactly should be checked.
  3. For the project manager: Be your team’s decision maker and help everybody stay on track. Model positive interactions.

Centrally, we always suggest that you don’t let great be the enemy of good. Don’t dwell on making everything perfect on the first version. Remember that OER are living documents with opportunities for improvement in future versions.

Homework:

Please note that both the adaptation of your team’s author guide and the writing of a sample chapter are homework activities you can access from the session handout [linked above], laid out in more detail for you in the handout for session 8. We recommend that you adapt and further develop these documents together with your teams and then share them with everybody as they embark to create or adapt content for your OER. I will ask you for updates on these two documents when we meet for our first Phase Two session next month.

To prepare for your transition into the Textbook Success Program Phase 2, we want to briefly speak to the logistics, expectations, and cohort communication.

Concerning the logistics, we would like to ask you to complete the following two activities:

  1. Indicate your availability for monthly meetings starting [dates] in a scheduling poll that will be sent out to you soon.
  2. Provide feedback and inform phase 2 planning by taking the TSP Phase 1 Participant Survey. I shared the link in our chat and will also email it to you. Please try to complete the survey as soon as possible but no later than August 19. I will use the survey to help plan our Phase 2 sessions.

As for the expectations regarding our monthly meetings in Phase 2, we want to highlight that we will continue to support your teams in whatever capacity we at REBUS and M.O.S.T. can. As your facilitator, I will invite your input prior to sessions, make useful connections regarding your project goals and progress, facilitate your in-forum and in-session sharing, assist you in finding solutions for challenges, and share relevant updates and news from the open education community.

In exchange, I hope that you will also actively engage in our monthly conversations. You can find our responsibilities detailed in both your cohort MOU and syllabus documents. I will update the latter document with our new meeting times once they have been finalized.

I look forward to working with you in phase 2 and cannot wait to meet with you or our first monthly session in September!

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