Session 8 Recap: Authoring and Editing Logistics

Textbook Success Program June 2023 Cohort
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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 organized manner.

You may also want to adopt Author Agreements 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 because it gives your OER structure and appeal, significantly impacting how useful it is for learners. The editing process, whether it is more substantial enterprise or more focused on copyediting and proofreading, can benefit from the diverse perspectives in your teams as it puts you in a position to push for the changes that place equity 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 few pieces of advice:

  1. Editing needs time, so plan well 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.

Remember: Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Don’t dwell on making everything perfect on the first go. Your OERs are living documents with opportunities for improvement in future versions.

Next week, we’ll look at more ways to get feedback and input on your projects — through peer and other kinds of review. Getting a seal of approval or recommendation from an external reviewer can help make your OER stronger and more appealing to adopters, so we’ll see how you can work that into your projects.

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.

Please remember to post your homework activities to your team’s project forum (see “About the June 2023 Cohort” for links to your individual projects. Have a great week!