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Jessica: So, hello, everyone, and welcome to the Open Education Network's Pub101. Thank you for joining us for today's session. My name is Jessica McLean and I am the director of OER and digital scholarship at University of Texas at Arlington. I'm going to be the host of this session and your facilitator for today. Soon, I'm going to be handing off to Karen Meijer from Kwantlen Polytechnic University to talk about developing a textbook. Sorry, there's a new session, so I forgot what we had called it. Developing a textbook. So, we will have time for questions and conversation at the end and please put your questions in the comments throughout if you have them. I hope that some of you who also have experience in this area will be able to share your insight and experience and your questions as we go through this session.
For our housekeeping, we have an orientation document that includes our schedule and links to session slides and recordings. So, you can check the document if you need to catch up with one of our sessions. Putting that link in the chat now. There's also the companion resource for these sessions, which is the Pub101 Canvas curriculum. So, that's where you'll find more information on this topic and templates and other links and resources too.
We are recording this session, so you will find that later in our YouTube playlist. And we are committed to providing a friendly, safe, and welcoming environment for everyone aligned with our community norms. So, please join us in creating a safe and constructive space.
So, to get us started today, we have a brief reflective question. And that question today is, if you want to put your comments in the chat, what is intimidating about helping an author develop an open textbook? Go ahead and put your responses to that question in the chat so we can start thinking about that. So, Jeff says, "Nothing," since he's helping himself. "Lots of things. Where to begin, how deep to go, how to present content." Yeah, definitely. Not knowing the content area is one that I feel definitely too. We have a lot of faculty members from different colleges here who want to present or publish, excuse me. "Time-consuming support they request." Definitely, there are definitely different expectations for how much support they need. "Finding accessible OER to adapt." For sure. "Lack of knowledge about their topic." Definitely. Please feel free to keep putting your thoughts in here as we keep going, but for now I will hand over to Karen to talk about her experience with developing a textbook.
Karen: Thank you. All right. So, first of all, I just want to ask you two questions and we're going be using Mentimeter for that. So, I'm just going to share my screen and ask you to make your way to Mentimeter. You're also welcome to put the answer in the chat if that works better for you, if you don't want to bother with going to a different site, totally fine, don't worry about it. All right. So, the first thing I really would love to know is how many textbook projects have you already worked on? I know we have a wide range of people that are taking this program, and so, I'm just curious where you're all falling on that scale. All right. So, it looks to be a good mix already. A couple of you have done a lot of this. A couple people more new to it. You helped some history instructors lightly adapt an American history textbook. Nice. Yeah. And the question of have you worked on, could have different forms, right? Doesn't need to mean that you've supported it from beginning to end.
All right. Thank you for that. So, we do really have a good mix here, but especially for the people that are newer to this, my question to you would be in your own educational journey, what are some of the elements that you found in textbooks and in educational materials that have helped you learn? Especially for those of you who've never worked on a textbook before, can you remember what it was like when you were using them and what kinds of things you liked seeing in there?
Nice. So, we're seeing a lot of people appreciate infographics and illustrations. Real world examples, always very popular as well. Interesting that our audio is quite low at the moment. Nice. Questions at the end and little knowledge tech quizzes. Yeah. Pictures and graphics. Yeah, these things can really help, right? Can really help you retain the knowledge. All right. Thank you.
So, what I'm trying to get at with this question is to have you thinking about all the ways in which you are already familiar with this topic, to maybe make it a little bit less intimidating to work on. Right? We've all done schooling of this kind, and so, we actually do know what textbooks are like and what the expectation is for them.
So, I'm going to stop sharing this. Thank you very much for participating. And I'm just going to share my slides instead. All right. So, today we're going to be talking about just an intro to textbook publishing. So, for some of you this might be very familiar information, and I really look forward to hearing about your own experiences at the end of this and whether they're any different, whether they're the same, and whether you then have tips for people that are newer and starting out on this.
So, first of all, my name's Karen Meijer. Like you heard, I'm the Scholarly Communications and Copyright Librarian at Kwantlen Polytechnic University, which is in BC Canada. I'm located just under Vancouver in Surrey. So, my own publishing context is that I've been publishing in one form or another for over 20 years. And at the moment, I co-manage our publishing endeavors here at KPU. And really a core part of my job is all open related work in the library. We're kind of supposed to all be working on open things, but for me it's part of my portfolio. And so, what we're going to be talking about today is the process of developing an open textbook and what that is precisely, and also how that in practicality may look. And I'll try and give examples of experiences that I've had over the years and then give you tips that you can use in your own publishing work.
So, my experience with publishing open textbooks and OERs in a particular really began at KPU in 2017, 2018 when we launched our Open Publishing Suite, OPUS. At the moment we have 53 books in our Pressbooks catalog right now, although not all of them are textbooks and not all of them qualify as an OER, which we'll talk about later. My experience has mostly been with Pressbooks as a platform, but the principles are the same regardless of what platform you're using. And so, while it's convenient to have access to a platform like that, it's certainly not a necessity.
We usually have various kinds of open grants available, although because of budget issues that I'm sure you're all also very familiar with, they've been paused for the first time. We work with a mix of projects that are with and without grant funding support. And so, even though our grants are paused at the moment, that doesn't mean that we have no new project coming along.
So, OPUS really consists of Amanda Grey, the open education strategist in teaching and learning, and myself, but we also have help from student assistants and library assistants and instructional designers as needed. So, let's talk about textbooks. So, the opening reflection that we just looked at and talked about asked what is intimidating about helping an author develop an open textbook? And I think for me, one of the things that was most intimidating in the beginning was something that was also mentioned by a couple of you, that I'm not a subject expert, right? I'm not an instructional designer, I'm not a professional writer, I'm not a faculty member in that subject area. I'm a librarian. And so, it feels a little bit presumptive to try and help a faculty member develop the content of a textbook in their subject area.
Now, if you are also a librarian, you are probably used to helping people in subject areas that you're not an expert in. Right? We encounter this all the time. And you probably do know quite a bit about textbook development and what a textbook should look like, right? Like, we just looked at our Mentimeter question. And there are conversations that you can have with your authors that can get them thinking about these design questions without you telling them necessarily what to write. So, you really don't need to be an algebra expert in order to recognize whether the chapter is well laid out or whether it flows well, or whether examples or key takeaways or quizzes would add to the text.
So, we are talking mostly about open textbooks today, but you may also be asked to publish a wide range of books, some of which may be more traditionally textbook based than others. And so, it's really up to you to decide what kind of projects you will take on and how strict your requirements are for inclusion of particular elements. So, one of the key elements of an open textbook that you've learned about is that it has an open license which needs to have a no-derivatives clause. However, in some situations you may be asked to make an exception and then you'll just have to decide whether you want to include those works. So, for example, we have two indigenous-focused works, and in that case the request was for a no-derivatives license. And we have granted that because the material is very different and it's culturally appropriate to give that a no-derivatives license instead of a completely open license. So, helping publish open textbooks is really less intimidating name, I think, because really, you would know what it should look like when you saw it.
So, this is our workflow for publishing at the moment. I apologize if it's a little small. So, you'll notice that some of these stages are very much the same as the ones that you're learning about in your program, and you might all recognize several of them and we'll be touching on some of them later as well. So, ideally, authors will come to you at the beginning of a project where you can have lots of conversations and influence, or they come to you with a well-thought-out outline, or they might want to adapt materials that already have a lot of common textbook elements. And then sometimes you receive a big stack of paper, sometimes literally printed out paper, 20 years of teaching notes and you're asked to transform that into a textbook appropriate form. Like the intermediate algebra book that you saw the image of earlier. That was literally a stack of papers that high that was dumped on our desk and, "Can you make this into a textbook?" It was a great project, one of our first.
A book might also look a little different than a traditional textbook or it may be more wordy, more long form. And all of these are valid options. Your mileage will really vary of the kinds of things that you will encounter. Different disciplines also will have different standards, and so projects might look very different depending on the discipline. So, at KPU we deal with a mix of projects and some of them are very hands-on and some of them not so much. And so, our goal is to be more involved at the planning stages of the books we publish to help authors create the best product that they can. So, we've adapted our grant application and publishing agreements to reflect that, but at the moment I would say that's kind of medium aspirational. There's definitely room to improve and that's mostly a capacity issue, right? Because it's mostly Amanda and myself doing this work.
So, books are for readers. So, how do we talk about our audience? So, among all these different projects, the key purpose of a textbook remains the same. So, a textbook teaches something, right? It enhances a reader's knowledge on the subject and takes them from A to B. So, often authors will write a textbook for their own students, so their audience might be economic students at a specific institution. Grant projects are also often for specific courses or areas. However, when a work is openly licensed and therefore probably widely shared, other people may read and use it too. So, you need to ask the question of who can those people be? Are you writing for students of economics everywhere? Also, if you're writing to replace a textbook for a particular course, what are the learning objectives of that course? Right? And so, the reader audience really determines what your textbook is going to look like and what kinds of elements will be included.
So, some questions to ask of either yourself or the authors that you're working with is will students be involved with the creation? So, are we talking about open pedagogy projects where the textbook is developed together with students? Because that can really change how it is written, and often requires even clearer parameters of the projects. So, students could be creating exercises, multiple choice questions. They could be writing stories or translations. They could be writing the whole book together with their class.
The next question will be, are you writing at a particular level? So, what knowledge do you expect readers to have before starting the book? And then, what knowledge would you like them to have afterwards? So, where are we starting and where do we want to go? Textbooks will also be used for teaching, and so you'll need to ask the question of how would you teach with this? Right? And how would others teach with it? How would your colleagues at the same institution teach with it? Or how would people at different institutions teach with it?
And then lastly, you need to check whether the plan for the book is actually appropriate for the intended audience, so because different disciplines have different expectations of what a textbook may look like, different projects will look very differently. So, for example, an ancient history textbook versus a tax textbook, or the Case Studies on Social Issues on the top right there is a very different kind of book than the Intro to Criminology, which is really Criminology 101, that's below it.
So, these are some examples of different kinds of book projects that may come across your desk. And so, each has different requirements. So, the first book is Developing Organizational and Managerial Wisdom, which is really kind of like business philosophy, has a lot of reflection questions in it and things for the reader to ponder and position themselves in the values that they have.
Lorrain's Logbook is primary material that was in the public domain that has been enhanced by the author and can be used for students in particular history courses. Organic Chemistry is really a chemistry 101 textbook. So, lots of formulas, lots of exercises, lots of quizzes in there. And then, the last book is Storytime in Spanish, and that was actually created by a group of students with the instructor, where the students wrote stories in Spanish and then wrote the English translation, and then the instructor spoke in the audio versions of those stories to show how they could be pronounced, but that's a really good example of a pedagogy project.
So, books also have a structure and they have a particular focus. So, if we're talking about things like scope and scale, so you really want to plan in advance what the scope of the book will be and try and stick to it. So, what is the flow of the book? What is the outline? What's the goal of the book? The question of whether you're starting from scratch or adapting material can also really change the project. So, your role can often be more advisory than developing the structure yourself, but there's still really good conversations to have with your authors, especially if you're helping them find materials to adapt.
So, we've added questions about scope and scale to our OER publishing agreement and grant application, because we need to be able to decide whether the proposed project can be done in the time of the time release that we are providing. And if not, whether the author would have a plan for that. So, depending on how you do and set up your projects, it might be good to ask about in the beginning as well, so that you know whether the project can actually be done, because we often find that authors think that they can get more done in the time allotted than they actually can, because life always happens and writing takes a long time.
So, you can ask things like whether there are other faculty members who can pick up the work if the original author can't make the deadline, or we'll ask whether there are smaller sections of the plan that can be completed so we can publish those and then maybe add the rest in a second edition, because it's really better to publish something than nothing. And since it's an open work, you can also iterate on it later on. So, it doesn't have to be absolutely perfect immediately.
An easy guideline for scope of a book is to follow the contents of a course that it's being developed for. That way the book will be useful for that particular course, or it can contain materials that the instructor has found lacking for a course. So, collections of case studies, like we saw before, or a study guide to go with a particular textbook. And so, when you're talking about scope, it's important to have a plan in case the work keeps expanding. So, you need to decide when you will actually refocus this project and when will you also say, "No, we can do this amount, we can't do any more"?
So, in terms of structure, we really recommend to our authors that they set up the structure or skeleton of their book first, before starting to write, so that they can see what it will look like overall and then can plan the work better. And then that doesn't mean that they're stuck with that, so you can reassure them of that. They can change it as they go along, but it gives them something to aim for. It's much easier to write if you already have the structure. Plus, it lets us know whether there may be areas that we can advise on or where there may be opportunities to add on later to the work. And we use Pressbooks for this because it's easy to drag and drop sections if we want to change the order, and it gives a really nice overview, but it's easy enough to do in other platforms as well and it can also just be done in a Word document.
So, you can expect things to change during the planning of the content and then again during the writing process. But depending on the platform that you're using to publish on, keep in mind the length of the eventual pages. It's generally better to not have to scroll too much, and a lot of students will be actually accessing your book on their mobile phones, and so long pages of texts are really cumbersome to read. So, it's better to break it up into smaller sections.
When a project is not connected to a grant or any particular deadline, but for example, it's a not immediate but pre-retirement work for an author, it can really get out of hand quickly as they keep adding more and more content. And so, you need to decide for yourself when enough is enough and let them know that it's better and more useful to publish the first volume instead of an entire magnum opus in one go.
When working with a team of authors or a class of students, it's also really important to make sure that everyone's on the same page about the scope of the book, because part of your role might be facilitating between them, especially when things are unclear, and you don't want to end up with a book with a lot of different kinds of chapters. Consistency is really important, especially for an open textbook, because the learning experience is much better if there's consistency among the materials. And so, setting up that kind of structure in advance really helps with that.
So, I really want to stress again that scope creep is really important to try to avoid, because it really doesn't help anyone. We often recommend that authors apply for the next round of OER grants to fulfill that need, if they really feel like they need to do a lot more because you wanted this project to be done at some point. Often, our authors will start teaching with a book that's basically published in draft and then they edit and add to that based on the student experience. And that's something we really encourage, especially if the book is written for a particular course, because then it already benefits the students, which is really our priority for our OER grant projects. We have a lot of zero textbook cost programs at KPU, and so part of our whole publishing endeavor is to support those zero textbook cost programs.
All right. So books, of course, also have content, so we need to decide what will be included. So, as you've learned, there are certain standard elements that are particular to a textbook and often used. There will be differences, but in general because of the specific purpose of a textbook, specific pedagogical elements will be included that will help the reader learn and retain the new knowledge. And so, in addition to the normal elements of a book, which are like front matter, content, back matter, you will have things such as introductions, glossaries, indexes, exercises, we'll have accessibility statements that we'll look at a little bit later as well. And to help our authors deal with all those kind of elements, because most of them use Pressbooks, almost all of them use Pressbooks, we've created a template for them to use when developing their books. And we also rely heavily on the inbuilt functionality of Pressbooks, such as the color text boxes, sidebars, images, videos, H5P. But you don't need to have access to Pressbooks in order to provide a template. There's also the stylesheet provided by OEN, for example, that'll be really useful, because it gives authors something to help organize and format their writing, and that makes sure that you end up with a consistent style. I'm happy to share this Pressbooks template if people are interested. It's as openly licensed as we can can have it. I can give a link to you later.
So, for our template, for the front matter, right? The role of front matter is to prepare the reader for the main content, right? So, it gives you information in order to start using the rest of the book. Right? So, we include things like licensing info, we have our accessibility statements, we have some information on how to use this book. We could have teaching resources, information for instructor, acknowledgements, introduction, those kind of things. Now, we require the licensing info and accessibility statements. The rest is kind of recommended. It might not be relevant for every single book, but the template gives you options and then faculty can just delete the parts that they don't need.
So, for the back matter, right now we have in there conclusion, appendix, glossary, bibliography. We do provide guidance for its use, right? Because not all textbooks have conclusions, but for example, if you want to use the conclusion section, we recommend that it summarizes the content, et cetera, et cetera. Now, the versioning history is really important in an OER. So, that one you really want to include because it is something that can be built upon and can change, it's really important to make sure that you note every time that happens. Now for us, certain changes in a book will actually trigger a new edition. This is mostly if the content changes to such a degree that the page numbers in a printed version would change, because we don't want students to have a printed version and then be confused if something else is referred to. But that's the decision that you can make in your own publishing program, like what triggers a new edition. We also would trigger a new edition if we add a complete audio version of the book, for example, we did that for the managerial wisdom one.
So, we just looked at some of the pedagogical elements that are the things that actually make a textbook a textbook, right? So, the things we looked at in the Mentimeter, like the exercises and practice questions, real life examples. So, often a textbook chapter will include elements like those. And so, for our OER grant projects, we ask authors to include at a minimum, learning objectives and exercises if their project is a textbook, and then we can talk about the other elements and see whether they are appropriate for that particular work. Now, we're not really strict about this, but we're happy to have a conversation with the faculty member and talk about what kinds of elements that they think are appropriate for their subject area. And because we also publish works that maybe don't check all the boxes for a textbook, we're a little bit fluid in that.
Pedagogical elements are also a great area to include students. So, for example, when the author has written the main text, students can write the reflection questions or summaries or quizzes and create images and video. And that's a really good way for them to also both integrate the knowledge and learn the subject area, and also participate in this open pedagogy project and end up with a product that they can present in their portfolios and things like that.
So, all those pedagogical elements are designed for a specific kind of learning, right? So, they guide the reader along the content and help them retain it. So, they make the content easier to digest and remember, and they also provide visual cues about the content and can create a consistent style that can be helpful for the reader. You're also looking for a balance between texts and images, infographics, other kind of visual aids, because everyone learns differently, and so including different kinds of elements can really create an inclusive experience for any kind of reader.
All right. So, the exciting thing about open textbooks and open materials in particular is that you can often add more interesting elements such as videos or interactive activities. And so, for example, this is a video that's embedded in one of our Spanish books. Right? And so, especially for language learning and learning about different cultures can be very helpful to integrate openly licensed videos like this.
And then, if you have access to something like the H5P, that can also be really helpful and that's really an area where you can play with what is included. So, H5P exercises can be multiple choice, like the one you see on the left there. They could be hotspot informational activities like the marketing one, where if you click on the I, you'll get different information about elements of marketing, or the timeline below, which is in a ancient history book. I think this is a timeline of Ancient Rome. Right? And so, they really provide you with different kinds of ways of learning. And so, as long as you decide on the minimum of items included, you can always add more pedagogical elements in later versions of the book. And so, like I said, for example, we have several books where audio versions were added later and we also have people applying for an additional OER grant to develop H5P activities for a book that they already previously published in a different project. Right? So, you can continue to improve on the work down the road.
And then, of course, for images these days you'll need to decide whether you're going to allow AI-generated images or text for that matter. So far we only have one book that includes any kind of AI. It's a generation of a cover image and it's in the automatic updating of some text. So, this is a tax textbook. So, the most recent tax rules and percentages were generated by AI, checked by the author. And then, all use of AI is mentioned in the front matter of the book. There's no real right or wrong answer for this. It's up to you. Of course there's questions of copyright, like those materials that have been generated we cannot actually license. We also tell people that no one else can then use them. They will have to create a different cover image for if they want to adapt that book. And we just make sure that it's really clearly mentioned every single part that AI is involved in any way.
So, also as a general reminder for any kind of media that will be included, you need to make sure that its licensing allows that and that the attribution is correct. So, it's easiest to keep track of that from the beginning with a spreadsheet, but sometimes when you receive a work created over many years or one that's already done, you may not be able to find that information. And so in that case, you need to be prepared that images may need to be recreated or other images found. We found that a lot with people who give us 10 years of their teaching notes and they're like, "I want you create an OER from this." And they have no idea anymore where they found the infographic or where they found the image. And so, oftentimes we'll recreate it for them or we'll have them recreate it.
I want to talk just a little bit about weaving in accessibility from the beginning, but I won't go into any detail because you have a whole session focused on accessibility on its own. But when we first started publishing, we did not have the focus on creating accessible works that we do now. And so, that means that our early works were all over the place in terms of accessibility. So, more recently, we've gone back and done accessibility assessments of many of our works, not all yet, but a bunch of them, to see what work needs to be done to make them accessible.
I really don't recommend doing this. It's a lot of extra work. I mean, I recommend you go back if you have to, but it's a lot of extra work. Some faculty are already retired, we can't reach them anymore. Going back and trying to fix accessibility issues in the work is a lot of work, but also just mentally a lot of work. You may have moved on to other projects, you may be thinking about other things, right? That project isn't fresh in your mind anymore. And so, even finding the time or being able to allocate the time to that can be difficult. So, if you make sure that you integrate accessibility from the start, it's really helpful and it saves a huge headache in the end.
So, once authors know the basics of accessibility, like how to format links or how to use headers correctly, how to include alt text, they can integrate that into their writing as they go. So, you can discuss things like the use of proper color, so that you don't need to recreate graphs or infographics if they show up with completely inaccessible colors, for example. It just saves you a lot of time.
So, in some cases it does make sense to leave certain kind of accessibility features to a second version because they can take a lot of extra time, such as that author that I mentioned that added an audio version to the entire book. So, he narrated the entire book and then we provided the entire audio file, but also downloadable files per chapter. Right? And so, we did that for a second edition because that was quite a bit of extra. But in the case of that Spanish language learning book with the stories, we did include audio versions in the chapters immediately, which made a lot of pedagogical sense, but also made it much more accessible.
So, I'll be honest with you and tell you that some of our works right now do not meet the level of accessibility that we would want to see. And we've had a couple occasions where authors just didn't, regardless of what we told them. So, luckily, that's only happened with works that I wouldn't necessarily classify as a textbook. But still, sometimes other departments may make this decision for you. There may be a decision from higher up that you need to publish this particular work, and then they make us publish it anyway even if we can't really stand behind it fully. And so, in that case, we also do try and go back and fix it later. But I would recommend that you set very clear guidelines and expectations from the beginning and also decide what you will absolutely not publish. Right? What is your minimum that you're willing to accept?
So, right now, what we're doing to make sure that we don't come into these same situations again is that we've integrated accessibility checks and education in multiple stages of the publishing process. So, in our grant applications, we already ask how will you address accessibility in your project? And then, we give some ideas. But then we also, when we adjudicate those grants, we have a rubric that we actually mark them based on how accessible they plan to make the work. We also flag potential issues during planning and then also as we see the writing come in. And then, we definitely do an accessibility review pre-publication. And so, all our newer works are much better in terms of accessibility than the older ones are.
So, we also include an accessibility statement at the beginning of our books where we list known accessibility features. So, you'll see an example of that there for the web version of Organic Chemistry II. Right? So, it just tells a little bit about what the options are in the book that make it accessible. And then, the other part of that is that we also identify known issues, which is not only useful for the reader, but also to anyone looking to adapt or build on the work, and also for ourselves, when we go back to the work, right? If we want to improve on it, it's a good reminder that we know what still needs to happen for this particular work. Thank you, Amanda, for that spreadsheet. I was hoping you would put a link in there.
All right. So, lastly, there is also an expectation that the book will undergo some kind of peer review, but there are different ways for that to happen. Right? So, it's good to start thinking about peer review early in a project. Right? So, who can you call on for peer review? Does the author have people that they can call on? Are you going to send out a call for reviewers yourself? Right? Will the book be reviewed by students as it's being taught with? That's not necessarily peer review, but it's review of a kind, right? It will definitely improve the work as feedback comes in. You can also submit the book for open review somewhere probably. Right? So, these are all things that will be easy to think about in the beginning, so you don't have to scramble at the end.
The other question you need to ask yourself is are you able to pay for peer review in some form? So, if you're having grant funding, can you pay in funds? Can you pay in PD funding if the peer reviewers are members from your own institution, right? Is there material that needs special review like Indigenous materials, right? We send those out for separate review by someone qualified to do that, and we do recommend paying all Indigenous reviewers for their time. Right? So, where would you find the money for that? Will the book be reviewed as chapters are done or the whole book at once? Same with editing. Will you edit it one chapter at a time or all at once? Will the content review happen at the same time as copyright or accessibility checks? Right? Because those things can happen at the same time and that might be a time saver.
And then lastly, will it be acceptable to you or would it be acceptable to you if the book is not reviewed? If it's not peer reviewed in the traditional sense, will you still publish it? We have some works that I would say are not peer-reviewed in a traditional sense, but are being used in courses to much success and are also being improved upon every time that they're being used in a course. So, we're okay with that, but that's a question for you to think about and to make a decision about.
So, for all of the above, ask yourself, who can you involve in this? Who can help you? Right? How many people are involved in your publishing endeavor? Can you ask for help at your institution? Do you have instructional designers who can help you or staff or student assistants or colleagues or other faculty, librarians? Right? So, at KPU we have access to all those things at the moment, but since we're having so many budget cuts and some positions are disappearing, we may have to reassess. And so, the question would be, how are you going to pivot your publishing endeavor if that kind of support falls away? Right? What are the minimums that you're going to be able to commit to? What are you going to do if suddenly it's just you?
So, this was a very brief, quick introduction to textbook publishing and what a textbook would look like and how you can work with it. But for now, I would say, let's chat more. I would really love to hear your questions. I would love to hear your experiences about any of this. Any comments. I will turn it over to Jessica to facilitate.
Jessica: Thank you so much, Karen. That was a fantastic presentation and I took a lot of notes, a lot of notes, and I will be in contact with you soon to talk more about some of these specific things. One thing I think I really appreciated was the way you were talking about scope and scale, because I think that's something I do see a lot where faculty members come in and say, "I want to do this and this and this." And I think it's a relief to them to hear it does not have to be all at once, that this is something that can continue to grow and improve over time. So, I do appreciate that as a really important part of this.
So, now's the time for our Q&A. So, if you want to put your questions in the chat, I will go ahead and ask them out loud. If you would like to raise your hand and come on camera or not on camera, but on audio, you're welcome to do that too. So, our first question in the chat is, "What is an appropriate average amount to pay to a peer reviewer?"
Karen: I think it really depends. So, at KPU, the way that it works is we are not allowed to pay with money our own faculty. We are only allowed to give PD funding, and I think that's usually $500. That's just the way the collective agreement works, I guess. But if it's an outside reviewer, I think our Indigenous reviewers, we've also paid $500 and that was because we had a grant that could pay for that. Right? So, I honestly don't know what the industry standard would be, because often peer review is free. Right? We do this as an academic service. Sorry if that's a not very satisfying answer.
Jessica: I think that's a true answer though. I think it's going to probably come down to institutional culture in some ways, just what do you decide, what are you able to do? If anyone else has any experience with that and wants gives some examples in the chat, that would be really helpful. Any other questions, anyone?
Karen: I'd like to make one more comment about what you just said about scope, because I think the other thing, if an author comes to you and a project is ballooning, it's really good to go back to, why are we doing this project? Are we helping students in a particular course? Are we trying to switch a course to a ZTC course? Right? So, in that case, what is the minimum that we can do to still fulfill that goal? Right? And then everything else can be done later.
Jessica: I think that's a great point. Definitely. I have another question while we wait for other people to think of things. You've obviously been publishing for a very long time and I know that there are trends in publishing that we see come and go. Obviously AI is a big thing right now. Is there anything you're seeing that people are really excited about including in their OER right now?
Karen: I mean, people are still so excited about any interactive element. Right? Because it's also fun, it's fun to work with. So, a lot of H5P activities, not all of them are accessible and there is an overview somewhere about which ones are and which ones aren't. So, that's an important thing to keep in mind. Definitely AI. Like when our tax faculty member said that he was going to do that, we were kind of taken aback. We hadn't expected that that would be something that someone publishing a book would be interested in. But of course, I mean, he uses AI all the time for everything, and so, it made sense to him to integrate it. Yeah, I think those would be the main things that I'm seeing right now.
We're also having people move away from more traditional book publishing platforms and work a lot with WordPress, but still make textbook-like objects. So, new platforms that are a little bit more flexible. Not that WordPress is a new platform, but anything that's coming out, people are willing to experiment with. Thank you for sharing that.
Jessica: Yes, I happened to have that just open recently when I was thinking about it for something else, but I shared the list of the content types in H5P that are accessible and which ones are not. Okay. Question in the chat that says, "What's your take on embedding videos in OER books? For example, if a video's on YouTube, does that usually make it okay to include or are there copyright things to watch out for?"
Karen: Okay. So, in terms of integrating videos that are from YouTube, first of all, the thing you're doing is linking, right? You're embedding a video, but it's only a link. You're not actually downloading the video and uploading it to your platform, which has a whole different copyright assessment attached to it. So, we are not making a copy, we are making a fancy link. And so, when the video disappears from YouTube, the link disappears. It doesn't work anymore. However, you are expected to do your due diligence and if someone's sharing a Disney video on YouTube, it's not going to be legal, right?
So, do your due diligence in checking whether that video is likely to be legally uploaded. It's even better if you choose some that are openly licensed, right? That's what I would recommend. And often you can find things, but because we're just linking, we're not actually making a copy of the work. And so, the copyright assessment is quite liberal.
Jessica: All right. Kate, would you like to ask your question?
Kate: I would. I have two questions. So, the first one is kind of about versioning. Do you take whatever published materials you create and put it in some type of institutional repository or do you let it be on its platform? That's my first question.
Karen: A lot of our Pressbooks are in our institutional repository because we're trying to show faculty work, but they are only on there as a PDF file. And it is mentioned when that PDF file was created and the version as of this date, and then there's a link to Pressbooks like, "For the most current version, please go here." We have not yet gone back into our IR and updated all those links, but we're currently migrating to a new platform, and so, I will actually go back and take that as an opportunity.
So, I know a lot of people with their IR are only putting in items that always stay the same or that are always there. We are a little bit more liberal with ... I'm okay with taking an old version down and uploading the new one, right? It's not an archive for us. But yeah, it's up to you really what you want to do with that. Of course, it's a PDF, so there's not as much as you can do with it as with the EPUB online.
Kate: Right. Thank you for that. Would you mind a second question or do you want to go to somebody in the chat? Okay.
Jessica: Go ahead.
Kate: So, I've worked with a couple of faculty who, they've signed up to write a textbook, but then in the way that we frame the conversation, we're compensating them for writing the textbook, not for redesigning their course. So, they find that when they are... Even just when we're swapping out a textbook, you pull one thread and then you kind of have to do everything else all over again. Could you talk a little bit about how you frame that conversation about writing the textbook, redesigning your course?
Karen: Yeah. So, we do also, we get that question as well, right? Some people come to us and say, "I want to redesign my course. And with that I'm writing an open textbook." Some of them are just like, "I'm just going to write this introduction to criminology because it doesn't exist as an OER. We're all using this other textbook and we're just going to put it in there."
Luckily, we have instructional designers that we can refer to. So, when someone comes to the project like that, we do warn people that this is what likely will happen, but also, we emphasize them trying the teaching out over time with this new material. Right? So, there's not always a strict switch from one to the other immediately. We're just saying you can iterate, you can try and add different things. You can try and add bits. But yeah, they do need to be aware that work can spiral, for sure. And the grant funding is, like you said, only for developing the textbook. There are other grants that they can apply for to get help redesigning their course. So, we're lucky in that effect, although not right now.
Jessica: All right. We've had a flurry of comments in there and I'm going to try and pick out the ones that are questions. So, a great question here. "What do you do with bad peer reviews, are all published automatically?"
Karen: So, you mean the peer reviews are published?
Jessica: I think if all the books... My interpretation is all the books published, even if they receive bad peer reviews.
Karen: Oh, I mean, if they receive really bad peer reviews, then we would ask the authors to change. If it's really terrible, if people are like, "This is horrible. This is awful." I hope that they would also give some suggestions and feedback on how to make it better. Right? Because if we're doing peer review at the stage where it's not officially published yet, that is an opportunity for the author to make some more changes. Right?
We have not yet encountered a situation where it was so bad and couldn't be changed anymore that we wouldn't publish it, luckily. I think there would definitely be a point where we can just be like, "Well, sorry. You are welcome to use this in your course, but we're not going to add it to our catalog." We have actually done that with one previous work that where the person just didn't listen to the accessibility requests and requirements and we were like, "No, this is not getting our logo on it. This is not going in our catalog." It's a hard thing to tell someone. You have to be really diplomatic about it. But if you have those things written out, if you have those policies and guidelines from the beginning, it's much easier to point to them and be like, "Well, you failed these markers of quality, so this needs to be improved upon before we can move forward."
Jessica: And there are a couple of comments in there as well from Cheryl and Amanda following up on that question. I think that's a really interesting question there. Next, a comment from Rachel, "I had a faculty member specifically request professional copy editing and figure design, and I was pleased at their awareness and happily had already set up a process to provide services, although it added five to seven months and cost to the project. Even if we can offer copy editing and other services, they may not be at the highest professional level in smaller publishing programs."
Karen: Yeah. We're very lucky that we have contracted with an external professional copy editor who's very fast, very reasonably priced, and is doing really good work. But we didn't always have that. And so, then sometimes the copy editing was done by me ,because I'm trained as a copy editor as well. And that's terrible. Don't do that.
Jessica: I am too. And yes, I've tried to avoid it as much as possible. From William, "Open pedagogical elements sound like a great way to embed OER content to courses and get value from the text and content being created. Do you find that instructors are interested in this as a form of review or are they keen on full peer review?"
Karen: It's really a mix. Some of our instructors really want the official full peer review, and a lot of them are just really happy to just start teaching with it, develop based on student feedback, maybe send it to two colleagues who can give them suggestions, but it's really mixed. I find that publishers, not publishers, authors when they're publishing an OER are often more willing to think about alternative ways instead of going through a traditional commercial publisher with their book, their baby, their main work that they're writing in their subject area, where they want things to be much more traditional. Right? So, the closer you are to traditional kinds of publishing, the more expectations authors will have of things going in a particular way and being much more keen on the very more prestigious kind of peer review.
Jessica: Okay. We have a couple minutes left. I don't see any more questions, but I'll just draw people's attention to some points in the chat. So, Amanda shared an example of versioning. Daniel is talking about copyrighted videos that are being uploaded, which can cause copyright strikes at the YouTube level, which is a great thing to-
Karen: Yeah. Especially the music. Yeah, absolutely. So, you have to do your due diligence, for sure, with videos.
Jessica: Yeah. Cheryl brings up a good point that with YouTube videos, we are seeing them disappear because of all kinds of different issues. So, making sure that we're building in reviews of links, Amanda brings up link reviews, I think is super important. And then one last question, "How would OPUS conduct their post-publication step in the workflow, gathering usage data and metrics?"
Karen: So, right now, we are in between metrics platforms, and so right now we're just using the Pressbooks metrics that you can get. This will be an excellent question from my colleague Amanda, actually, because she's in charge of doing those kinds of things. But we are moving in between platforms and looking at something that will give us the kind of usage metrics that faculty actually want. Right? How many people are reading the book from particular areas? How many people are using it, downloading it? Things like that. Can't give you a very concrete answer to that one.
Jessica: I think we have maybe one last question here, "Does OEN have any copy editing services or contractors built in?" I'm not sure of the answer for that, that's something that we may need to follow up with later on.
Amanda: That's a great question for Karen Lauritsen...
Jessica: Yes.
Amanda: ...when she gets back. In the past, there was, you could contract with Scribe as part of the OEN Publishing Cooperative. I'm not sure what that looks like anymore, but they're lovely to work with. But we will save that and have Karen answer that question.
Jessica: Definitely. All right, and we are right out of time. So, thank you so much to Karen for the presentation today. I think obviously you can tell from the chat that we had a lot of thinking and questioning around that, a lot of reflection, and I really appreciate sharing your experience with us today.
So, thank you all for joining us for this session and I hope that you'll be back with us next week for the next session. We recommend reviewing unit two to prepare for our creating inclusion session next week. I hope you all have a great week and we'll see you next Wednesday.
Karen: Thanks, everyone.
END OF VIDEO
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Welcome to the third synchronous session of Pub101 in 2025. Hosted by Jessica McClean (she/her) of the University of Texas at Arlington, today's presentation features guest speaker Karen Meijer (she/her) of Kwantlen Polytechnic University. Karen brings more than 20 years of publishing experience to our discussion, including insight to help us integrate accessibility practices from the start, plan a structured, organized publication, and much more.
Watch the video recording of this session or keep reading for a full transcript. For those interested in reading the conversation that took place among participants and the resources shared, the chat transcript is also available below.
Note: If your comments appear in the transcripts and you would like your name or other identifying information removed, please contact Tonia.
Watch the video recording of this session or keep reading for a full transcript. For those interested in reading the conversation that took place among participants and the resources shared, the chat transcript is also available below.
Note: If your comments appear in the transcripts and you would like your name or other identifying information removed, please contact Tonia.
Audio Transcript
Speakers:
- Jessica McClean (Director of OER, University of Texas at Arlington)
- Karen Meijer (Scholarly Communications Librarian, Kwantlen Polytechnic University)
Jessica: So, hello, everyone, and welcome to the Open Education Network's Pub101. Thank you for joining us for today's session. My name is Jessica McLean and I am the director of OER and digital scholarship at University of Texas at Arlington. I'm going to be the host of this session and your facilitator for today. Soon, I'm going to be handing off to Karen Meijer from Kwantlen Polytechnic University to talk about developing a textbook. Sorry, there's a new session, so I forgot what we had called it. Developing a textbook. So, we will have time for questions and conversation at the end and please put your questions in the comments throughout if you have them. I hope that some of you who also have experience in this area will be able to share your insight and experience and your questions as we go through this session.
For our housekeeping, we have an orientation document that includes our schedule and links to session slides and recordings. So, you can check the document if you need to catch up with one of our sessions. Putting that link in the chat now. There's also the companion resource for these sessions, which is the Pub101 Canvas curriculum. So, that's where you'll find more information on this topic and templates and other links and resources too.
We are recording this session, so you will find that later in our YouTube playlist. And we are committed to providing a friendly, safe, and welcoming environment for everyone aligned with our community norms. So, please join us in creating a safe and constructive space.
So, to get us started today, we have a brief reflective question. And that question today is, if you want to put your comments in the chat, what is intimidating about helping an author develop an open textbook? Go ahead and put your responses to that question in the chat so we can start thinking about that. So, Jeff says, "Nothing," since he's helping himself. "Lots of things. Where to begin, how deep to go, how to present content." Yeah, definitely. Not knowing the content area is one that I feel definitely too. We have a lot of faculty members from different colleges here who want to present or publish, excuse me. "Time-consuming support they request." Definitely, there are definitely different expectations for how much support they need. "Finding accessible OER to adapt." For sure. "Lack of knowledge about their topic." Definitely. Please feel free to keep putting your thoughts in here as we keep going, but for now I will hand over to Karen to talk about her experience with developing a textbook.
Karen: Thank you. All right. So, first of all, I just want to ask you two questions and we're going be using Mentimeter for that. So, I'm just going to share my screen and ask you to make your way to Mentimeter. You're also welcome to put the answer in the chat if that works better for you, if you don't want to bother with going to a different site, totally fine, don't worry about it. All right. So, the first thing I really would love to know is how many textbook projects have you already worked on? I know we have a wide range of people that are taking this program, and so, I'm just curious where you're all falling on that scale. All right. So, it looks to be a good mix already. A couple of you have done a lot of this. A couple people more new to it. You helped some history instructors lightly adapt an American history textbook. Nice. Yeah. And the question of have you worked on, could have different forms, right? Doesn't need to mean that you've supported it from beginning to end.
All right. Thank you for that. So, we do really have a good mix here, but especially for the people that are newer to this, my question to you would be in your own educational journey, what are some of the elements that you found in textbooks and in educational materials that have helped you learn? Especially for those of you who've never worked on a textbook before, can you remember what it was like when you were using them and what kinds of things you liked seeing in there?
Nice. So, we're seeing a lot of people appreciate infographics and illustrations. Real world examples, always very popular as well. Interesting that our audio is quite low at the moment. Nice. Questions at the end and little knowledge tech quizzes. Yeah. Pictures and graphics. Yeah, these things can really help, right? Can really help you retain the knowledge. All right. Thank you.
So, what I'm trying to get at with this question is to have you thinking about all the ways in which you are already familiar with this topic, to maybe make it a little bit less intimidating to work on. Right? We've all done schooling of this kind, and so, we actually do know what textbooks are like and what the expectation is for them.
So, I'm going to stop sharing this. Thank you very much for participating. And I'm just going to share my slides instead. All right. So, today we're going to be talking about just an intro to textbook publishing. So, for some of you this might be very familiar information, and I really look forward to hearing about your own experiences at the end of this and whether they're any different, whether they're the same, and whether you then have tips for people that are newer and starting out on this.
So, first of all, my name's Karen Meijer. Like you heard, I'm the Scholarly Communications and Copyright Librarian at Kwantlen Polytechnic University, which is in BC Canada. I'm located just under Vancouver in Surrey. So, my own publishing context is that I've been publishing in one form or another for over 20 years. And at the moment, I co-manage our publishing endeavors here at KPU. And really a core part of my job is all open related work in the library. We're kind of supposed to all be working on open things, but for me it's part of my portfolio. And so, what we're going to be talking about today is the process of developing an open textbook and what that is precisely, and also how that in practicality may look. And I'll try and give examples of experiences that I've had over the years and then give you tips that you can use in your own publishing work.
So, my experience with publishing open textbooks and OERs in a particular really began at KPU in 2017, 2018 when we launched our Open Publishing Suite, OPUS. At the moment we have 53 books in our Pressbooks catalog right now, although not all of them are textbooks and not all of them qualify as an OER, which we'll talk about later. My experience has mostly been with Pressbooks as a platform, but the principles are the same regardless of what platform you're using. And so, while it's convenient to have access to a platform like that, it's certainly not a necessity.
We usually have various kinds of open grants available, although because of budget issues that I'm sure you're all also very familiar with, they've been paused for the first time. We work with a mix of projects that are with and without grant funding support. And so, even though our grants are paused at the moment, that doesn't mean that we have no new project coming along.
So, OPUS really consists of Amanda Grey, the open education strategist in teaching and learning, and myself, but we also have help from student assistants and library assistants and instructional designers as needed. So, let's talk about textbooks. So, the opening reflection that we just looked at and talked about asked what is intimidating about helping an author develop an open textbook? And I think for me, one of the things that was most intimidating in the beginning was something that was also mentioned by a couple of you, that I'm not a subject expert, right? I'm not an instructional designer, I'm not a professional writer, I'm not a faculty member in that subject area. I'm a librarian. And so, it feels a little bit presumptive to try and help a faculty member develop the content of a textbook in their subject area.
Now, if you are also a librarian, you are probably used to helping people in subject areas that you're not an expert in. Right? We encounter this all the time. And you probably do know quite a bit about textbook development and what a textbook should look like, right? Like, we just looked at our Mentimeter question. And there are conversations that you can have with your authors that can get them thinking about these design questions without you telling them necessarily what to write. So, you really don't need to be an algebra expert in order to recognize whether the chapter is well laid out or whether it flows well, or whether examples or key takeaways or quizzes would add to the text.
So, we are talking mostly about open textbooks today, but you may also be asked to publish a wide range of books, some of which may be more traditionally textbook based than others. And so, it's really up to you to decide what kind of projects you will take on and how strict your requirements are for inclusion of particular elements. So, one of the key elements of an open textbook that you've learned about is that it has an open license which needs to have a no-derivatives clause. However, in some situations you may be asked to make an exception and then you'll just have to decide whether you want to include those works. So, for example, we have two indigenous-focused works, and in that case the request was for a no-derivatives license. And we have granted that because the material is very different and it's culturally appropriate to give that a no-derivatives license instead of a completely open license. So, helping publish open textbooks is really less intimidating name, I think, because really, you would know what it should look like when you saw it.
So, this is our workflow for publishing at the moment. I apologize if it's a little small. So, you'll notice that some of these stages are very much the same as the ones that you're learning about in your program, and you might all recognize several of them and we'll be touching on some of them later as well. So, ideally, authors will come to you at the beginning of a project where you can have lots of conversations and influence, or they come to you with a well-thought-out outline, or they might want to adapt materials that already have a lot of common textbook elements. And then sometimes you receive a big stack of paper, sometimes literally printed out paper, 20 years of teaching notes and you're asked to transform that into a textbook appropriate form. Like the intermediate algebra book that you saw the image of earlier. That was literally a stack of papers that high that was dumped on our desk and, "Can you make this into a textbook?" It was a great project, one of our first.
A book might also look a little different than a traditional textbook or it may be more wordy, more long form. And all of these are valid options. Your mileage will really vary of the kinds of things that you will encounter. Different disciplines also will have different standards, and so projects might look very different depending on the discipline. So, at KPU we deal with a mix of projects and some of them are very hands-on and some of them not so much. And so, our goal is to be more involved at the planning stages of the books we publish to help authors create the best product that they can. So, we've adapted our grant application and publishing agreements to reflect that, but at the moment I would say that's kind of medium aspirational. There's definitely room to improve and that's mostly a capacity issue, right? Because it's mostly Amanda and myself doing this work.
So, books are for readers. So, how do we talk about our audience? So, among all these different projects, the key purpose of a textbook remains the same. So, a textbook teaches something, right? It enhances a reader's knowledge on the subject and takes them from A to B. So, often authors will write a textbook for their own students, so their audience might be economic students at a specific institution. Grant projects are also often for specific courses or areas. However, when a work is openly licensed and therefore probably widely shared, other people may read and use it too. So, you need to ask the question of who can those people be? Are you writing for students of economics everywhere? Also, if you're writing to replace a textbook for a particular course, what are the learning objectives of that course? Right? And so, the reader audience really determines what your textbook is going to look like and what kinds of elements will be included.
So, some questions to ask of either yourself or the authors that you're working with is will students be involved with the creation? So, are we talking about open pedagogy projects where the textbook is developed together with students? Because that can really change how it is written, and often requires even clearer parameters of the projects. So, students could be creating exercises, multiple choice questions. They could be writing stories or translations. They could be writing the whole book together with their class.
The next question will be, are you writing at a particular level? So, what knowledge do you expect readers to have before starting the book? And then, what knowledge would you like them to have afterwards? So, where are we starting and where do we want to go? Textbooks will also be used for teaching, and so you'll need to ask the question of how would you teach with this? Right? And how would others teach with it? How would your colleagues at the same institution teach with it? Or how would people at different institutions teach with it?
And then lastly, you need to check whether the plan for the book is actually appropriate for the intended audience, so because different disciplines have different expectations of what a textbook may look like, different projects will look very differently. So, for example, an ancient history textbook versus a tax textbook, or the Case Studies on Social Issues on the top right there is a very different kind of book than the Intro to Criminology, which is really Criminology 101, that's below it.
So, these are some examples of different kinds of book projects that may come across your desk. And so, each has different requirements. So, the first book is Developing Organizational and Managerial Wisdom, which is really kind of like business philosophy, has a lot of reflection questions in it and things for the reader to ponder and position themselves in the values that they have.
Lorrain's Logbook is primary material that was in the public domain that has been enhanced by the author and can be used for students in particular history courses. Organic Chemistry is really a chemistry 101 textbook. So, lots of formulas, lots of exercises, lots of quizzes in there. And then, the last book is Storytime in Spanish, and that was actually created by a group of students with the instructor, where the students wrote stories in Spanish and then wrote the English translation, and then the instructor spoke in the audio versions of those stories to show how they could be pronounced, but that's a really good example of a pedagogy project.
So, books also have a structure and they have a particular focus. So, if we're talking about things like scope and scale, so you really want to plan in advance what the scope of the book will be and try and stick to it. So, what is the flow of the book? What is the outline? What's the goal of the book? The question of whether you're starting from scratch or adapting material can also really change the project. So, your role can often be more advisory than developing the structure yourself, but there's still really good conversations to have with your authors, especially if you're helping them find materials to adapt.
So, we've added questions about scope and scale to our OER publishing agreement and grant application, because we need to be able to decide whether the proposed project can be done in the time of the time release that we are providing. And if not, whether the author would have a plan for that. So, depending on how you do and set up your projects, it might be good to ask about in the beginning as well, so that you know whether the project can actually be done, because we often find that authors think that they can get more done in the time allotted than they actually can, because life always happens and writing takes a long time.
So, you can ask things like whether there are other faculty members who can pick up the work if the original author can't make the deadline, or we'll ask whether there are smaller sections of the plan that can be completed so we can publish those and then maybe add the rest in a second edition, because it's really better to publish something than nothing. And since it's an open work, you can also iterate on it later on. So, it doesn't have to be absolutely perfect immediately.
An easy guideline for scope of a book is to follow the contents of a course that it's being developed for. That way the book will be useful for that particular course, or it can contain materials that the instructor has found lacking for a course. So, collections of case studies, like we saw before, or a study guide to go with a particular textbook. And so, when you're talking about scope, it's important to have a plan in case the work keeps expanding. So, you need to decide when you will actually refocus this project and when will you also say, "No, we can do this amount, we can't do any more"?
So, in terms of structure, we really recommend to our authors that they set up the structure or skeleton of their book first, before starting to write, so that they can see what it will look like overall and then can plan the work better. And then that doesn't mean that they're stuck with that, so you can reassure them of that. They can change it as they go along, but it gives them something to aim for. It's much easier to write if you already have the structure. Plus, it lets us know whether there may be areas that we can advise on or where there may be opportunities to add on later to the work. And we use Pressbooks for this because it's easy to drag and drop sections if we want to change the order, and it gives a really nice overview, but it's easy enough to do in other platforms as well and it can also just be done in a Word document.
So, you can expect things to change during the planning of the content and then again during the writing process. But depending on the platform that you're using to publish on, keep in mind the length of the eventual pages. It's generally better to not have to scroll too much, and a lot of students will be actually accessing your book on their mobile phones, and so long pages of texts are really cumbersome to read. So, it's better to break it up into smaller sections.
When a project is not connected to a grant or any particular deadline, but for example, it's a not immediate but pre-retirement work for an author, it can really get out of hand quickly as they keep adding more and more content. And so, you need to decide for yourself when enough is enough and let them know that it's better and more useful to publish the first volume instead of an entire magnum opus in one go.
When working with a team of authors or a class of students, it's also really important to make sure that everyone's on the same page about the scope of the book, because part of your role might be facilitating between them, especially when things are unclear, and you don't want to end up with a book with a lot of different kinds of chapters. Consistency is really important, especially for an open textbook, because the learning experience is much better if there's consistency among the materials. And so, setting up that kind of structure in advance really helps with that.
So, I really want to stress again that scope creep is really important to try to avoid, because it really doesn't help anyone. We often recommend that authors apply for the next round of OER grants to fulfill that need, if they really feel like they need to do a lot more because you wanted this project to be done at some point. Often, our authors will start teaching with a book that's basically published in draft and then they edit and add to that based on the student experience. And that's something we really encourage, especially if the book is written for a particular course, because then it already benefits the students, which is really our priority for our OER grant projects. We have a lot of zero textbook cost programs at KPU, and so part of our whole publishing endeavor is to support those zero textbook cost programs.
All right. So books, of course, also have content, so we need to decide what will be included. So, as you've learned, there are certain standard elements that are particular to a textbook and often used. There will be differences, but in general because of the specific purpose of a textbook, specific pedagogical elements will be included that will help the reader learn and retain the new knowledge. And so, in addition to the normal elements of a book, which are like front matter, content, back matter, you will have things such as introductions, glossaries, indexes, exercises, we'll have accessibility statements that we'll look at a little bit later as well. And to help our authors deal with all those kind of elements, because most of them use Pressbooks, almost all of them use Pressbooks, we've created a template for them to use when developing their books. And we also rely heavily on the inbuilt functionality of Pressbooks, such as the color text boxes, sidebars, images, videos, H5P. But you don't need to have access to Pressbooks in order to provide a template. There's also the stylesheet provided by OEN, for example, that'll be really useful, because it gives authors something to help organize and format their writing, and that makes sure that you end up with a consistent style. I'm happy to share this Pressbooks template if people are interested. It's as openly licensed as we can can have it. I can give a link to you later.
So, for our template, for the front matter, right? The role of front matter is to prepare the reader for the main content, right? So, it gives you information in order to start using the rest of the book. Right? So, we include things like licensing info, we have our accessibility statements, we have some information on how to use this book. We could have teaching resources, information for instructor, acknowledgements, introduction, those kind of things. Now, we require the licensing info and accessibility statements. The rest is kind of recommended. It might not be relevant for every single book, but the template gives you options and then faculty can just delete the parts that they don't need.
So, for the back matter, right now we have in there conclusion, appendix, glossary, bibliography. We do provide guidance for its use, right? Because not all textbooks have conclusions, but for example, if you want to use the conclusion section, we recommend that it summarizes the content, et cetera, et cetera. Now, the versioning history is really important in an OER. So, that one you really want to include because it is something that can be built upon and can change, it's really important to make sure that you note every time that happens. Now for us, certain changes in a book will actually trigger a new edition. This is mostly if the content changes to such a degree that the page numbers in a printed version would change, because we don't want students to have a printed version and then be confused if something else is referred to. But that's the decision that you can make in your own publishing program, like what triggers a new edition. We also would trigger a new edition if we add a complete audio version of the book, for example, we did that for the managerial wisdom one.
So, we just looked at some of the pedagogical elements that are the things that actually make a textbook a textbook, right? So, the things we looked at in the Mentimeter, like the exercises and practice questions, real life examples. So, often a textbook chapter will include elements like those. And so, for our OER grant projects, we ask authors to include at a minimum, learning objectives and exercises if their project is a textbook, and then we can talk about the other elements and see whether they are appropriate for that particular work. Now, we're not really strict about this, but we're happy to have a conversation with the faculty member and talk about what kinds of elements that they think are appropriate for their subject area. And because we also publish works that maybe don't check all the boxes for a textbook, we're a little bit fluid in that.
Pedagogical elements are also a great area to include students. So, for example, when the author has written the main text, students can write the reflection questions or summaries or quizzes and create images and video. And that's a really good way for them to also both integrate the knowledge and learn the subject area, and also participate in this open pedagogy project and end up with a product that they can present in their portfolios and things like that.
So, all those pedagogical elements are designed for a specific kind of learning, right? So, they guide the reader along the content and help them retain it. So, they make the content easier to digest and remember, and they also provide visual cues about the content and can create a consistent style that can be helpful for the reader. You're also looking for a balance between texts and images, infographics, other kind of visual aids, because everyone learns differently, and so including different kinds of elements can really create an inclusive experience for any kind of reader.
All right. So, the exciting thing about open textbooks and open materials in particular is that you can often add more interesting elements such as videos or interactive activities. And so, for example, this is a video that's embedded in one of our Spanish books. Right? And so, especially for language learning and learning about different cultures can be very helpful to integrate openly licensed videos like this.
And then, if you have access to something like the H5P, that can also be really helpful and that's really an area where you can play with what is included. So, H5P exercises can be multiple choice, like the one you see on the left there. They could be hotspot informational activities like the marketing one, where if you click on the I, you'll get different information about elements of marketing, or the timeline below, which is in a ancient history book. I think this is a timeline of Ancient Rome. Right? And so, they really provide you with different kinds of ways of learning. And so, as long as you decide on the minimum of items included, you can always add more pedagogical elements in later versions of the book. And so, like I said, for example, we have several books where audio versions were added later and we also have people applying for an additional OER grant to develop H5P activities for a book that they already previously published in a different project. Right? So, you can continue to improve on the work down the road.
And then, of course, for images these days you'll need to decide whether you're going to allow AI-generated images or text for that matter. So far we only have one book that includes any kind of AI. It's a generation of a cover image and it's in the automatic updating of some text. So, this is a tax textbook. So, the most recent tax rules and percentages were generated by AI, checked by the author. And then, all use of AI is mentioned in the front matter of the book. There's no real right or wrong answer for this. It's up to you. Of course there's questions of copyright, like those materials that have been generated we cannot actually license. We also tell people that no one else can then use them. They will have to create a different cover image for if they want to adapt that book. And we just make sure that it's really clearly mentioned every single part that AI is involved in any way.
So, also as a general reminder for any kind of media that will be included, you need to make sure that its licensing allows that and that the attribution is correct. So, it's easiest to keep track of that from the beginning with a spreadsheet, but sometimes when you receive a work created over many years or one that's already done, you may not be able to find that information. And so in that case, you need to be prepared that images may need to be recreated or other images found. We found that a lot with people who give us 10 years of their teaching notes and they're like, "I want you create an OER from this." And they have no idea anymore where they found the infographic or where they found the image. And so, oftentimes we'll recreate it for them or we'll have them recreate it.
I want to talk just a little bit about weaving in accessibility from the beginning, but I won't go into any detail because you have a whole session focused on accessibility on its own. But when we first started publishing, we did not have the focus on creating accessible works that we do now. And so, that means that our early works were all over the place in terms of accessibility. So, more recently, we've gone back and done accessibility assessments of many of our works, not all yet, but a bunch of them, to see what work needs to be done to make them accessible.
I really don't recommend doing this. It's a lot of extra work. I mean, I recommend you go back if you have to, but it's a lot of extra work. Some faculty are already retired, we can't reach them anymore. Going back and trying to fix accessibility issues in the work is a lot of work, but also just mentally a lot of work. You may have moved on to other projects, you may be thinking about other things, right? That project isn't fresh in your mind anymore. And so, even finding the time or being able to allocate the time to that can be difficult. So, if you make sure that you integrate accessibility from the start, it's really helpful and it saves a huge headache in the end.
So, once authors know the basics of accessibility, like how to format links or how to use headers correctly, how to include alt text, they can integrate that into their writing as they go. So, you can discuss things like the use of proper color, so that you don't need to recreate graphs or infographics if they show up with completely inaccessible colors, for example. It just saves you a lot of time.
So, in some cases it does make sense to leave certain kind of accessibility features to a second version because they can take a lot of extra time, such as that author that I mentioned that added an audio version to the entire book. So, he narrated the entire book and then we provided the entire audio file, but also downloadable files per chapter. Right? And so, we did that for a second edition because that was quite a bit of extra. But in the case of that Spanish language learning book with the stories, we did include audio versions in the chapters immediately, which made a lot of pedagogical sense, but also made it much more accessible.
So, I'll be honest with you and tell you that some of our works right now do not meet the level of accessibility that we would want to see. And we've had a couple occasions where authors just didn't, regardless of what we told them. So, luckily, that's only happened with works that I wouldn't necessarily classify as a textbook. But still, sometimes other departments may make this decision for you. There may be a decision from higher up that you need to publish this particular work, and then they make us publish it anyway even if we can't really stand behind it fully. And so, in that case, we also do try and go back and fix it later. But I would recommend that you set very clear guidelines and expectations from the beginning and also decide what you will absolutely not publish. Right? What is your minimum that you're willing to accept?
So, right now, what we're doing to make sure that we don't come into these same situations again is that we've integrated accessibility checks and education in multiple stages of the publishing process. So, in our grant applications, we already ask how will you address accessibility in your project? And then, we give some ideas. But then we also, when we adjudicate those grants, we have a rubric that we actually mark them based on how accessible they plan to make the work. We also flag potential issues during planning and then also as we see the writing come in. And then, we definitely do an accessibility review pre-publication. And so, all our newer works are much better in terms of accessibility than the older ones are.
So, we also include an accessibility statement at the beginning of our books where we list known accessibility features. So, you'll see an example of that there for the web version of Organic Chemistry II. Right? So, it just tells a little bit about what the options are in the book that make it accessible. And then, the other part of that is that we also identify known issues, which is not only useful for the reader, but also to anyone looking to adapt or build on the work, and also for ourselves, when we go back to the work, right? If we want to improve on it, it's a good reminder that we know what still needs to happen for this particular work. Thank you, Amanda, for that spreadsheet. I was hoping you would put a link in there.
All right. So, lastly, there is also an expectation that the book will undergo some kind of peer review, but there are different ways for that to happen. Right? So, it's good to start thinking about peer review early in a project. Right? So, who can you call on for peer review? Does the author have people that they can call on? Are you going to send out a call for reviewers yourself? Right? Will the book be reviewed by students as it's being taught with? That's not necessarily peer review, but it's review of a kind, right? It will definitely improve the work as feedback comes in. You can also submit the book for open review somewhere probably. Right? So, these are all things that will be easy to think about in the beginning, so you don't have to scramble at the end.
The other question you need to ask yourself is are you able to pay for peer review in some form? So, if you're having grant funding, can you pay in funds? Can you pay in PD funding if the peer reviewers are members from your own institution, right? Is there material that needs special review like Indigenous materials, right? We send those out for separate review by someone qualified to do that, and we do recommend paying all Indigenous reviewers for their time. Right? So, where would you find the money for that? Will the book be reviewed as chapters are done or the whole book at once? Same with editing. Will you edit it one chapter at a time or all at once? Will the content review happen at the same time as copyright or accessibility checks? Right? Because those things can happen at the same time and that might be a time saver.
And then lastly, will it be acceptable to you or would it be acceptable to you if the book is not reviewed? If it's not peer reviewed in the traditional sense, will you still publish it? We have some works that I would say are not peer-reviewed in a traditional sense, but are being used in courses to much success and are also being improved upon every time that they're being used in a course. So, we're okay with that, but that's a question for you to think about and to make a decision about.
So, for all of the above, ask yourself, who can you involve in this? Who can help you? Right? How many people are involved in your publishing endeavor? Can you ask for help at your institution? Do you have instructional designers who can help you or staff or student assistants or colleagues or other faculty, librarians? Right? So, at KPU we have access to all those things at the moment, but since we're having so many budget cuts and some positions are disappearing, we may have to reassess. And so, the question would be, how are you going to pivot your publishing endeavor if that kind of support falls away? Right? What are the minimums that you're going to be able to commit to? What are you going to do if suddenly it's just you?
So, this was a very brief, quick introduction to textbook publishing and what a textbook would look like and how you can work with it. But for now, I would say, let's chat more. I would really love to hear your questions. I would love to hear your experiences about any of this. Any comments. I will turn it over to Jessica to facilitate.
Jessica: Thank you so much, Karen. That was a fantastic presentation and I took a lot of notes, a lot of notes, and I will be in contact with you soon to talk more about some of these specific things. One thing I think I really appreciated was the way you were talking about scope and scale, because I think that's something I do see a lot where faculty members come in and say, "I want to do this and this and this." And I think it's a relief to them to hear it does not have to be all at once, that this is something that can continue to grow and improve over time. So, I do appreciate that as a really important part of this.
So, now's the time for our Q&A. So, if you want to put your questions in the chat, I will go ahead and ask them out loud. If you would like to raise your hand and come on camera or not on camera, but on audio, you're welcome to do that too. So, our first question in the chat is, "What is an appropriate average amount to pay to a peer reviewer?"
Karen: I think it really depends. So, at KPU, the way that it works is we are not allowed to pay with money our own faculty. We are only allowed to give PD funding, and I think that's usually $500. That's just the way the collective agreement works, I guess. But if it's an outside reviewer, I think our Indigenous reviewers, we've also paid $500 and that was because we had a grant that could pay for that. Right? So, I honestly don't know what the industry standard would be, because often peer review is free. Right? We do this as an academic service. Sorry if that's a not very satisfying answer.
Jessica: I think that's a true answer though. I think it's going to probably come down to institutional culture in some ways, just what do you decide, what are you able to do? If anyone else has any experience with that and wants gives some examples in the chat, that would be really helpful. Any other questions, anyone?
Karen: I'd like to make one more comment about what you just said about scope, because I think the other thing, if an author comes to you and a project is ballooning, it's really good to go back to, why are we doing this project? Are we helping students in a particular course? Are we trying to switch a course to a ZTC course? Right? So, in that case, what is the minimum that we can do to still fulfill that goal? Right? And then everything else can be done later.
Jessica: I think that's a great point. Definitely. I have another question while we wait for other people to think of things. You've obviously been publishing for a very long time and I know that there are trends in publishing that we see come and go. Obviously AI is a big thing right now. Is there anything you're seeing that people are really excited about including in their OER right now?
Karen: I mean, people are still so excited about any interactive element. Right? Because it's also fun, it's fun to work with. So, a lot of H5P activities, not all of them are accessible and there is an overview somewhere about which ones are and which ones aren't. So, that's an important thing to keep in mind. Definitely AI. Like when our tax faculty member said that he was going to do that, we were kind of taken aback. We hadn't expected that that would be something that someone publishing a book would be interested in. But of course, I mean, he uses AI all the time for everything, and so, it made sense to him to integrate it. Yeah, I think those would be the main things that I'm seeing right now.
We're also having people move away from more traditional book publishing platforms and work a lot with WordPress, but still make textbook-like objects. So, new platforms that are a little bit more flexible. Not that WordPress is a new platform, but anything that's coming out, people are willing to experiment with. Thank you for sharing that.
Jessica: Yes, I happened to have that just open recently when I was thinking about it for something else, but I shared the list of the content types in H5P that are accessible and which ones are not. Okay. Question in the chat that says, "What's your take on embedding videos in OER books? For example, if a video's on YouTube, does that usually make it okay to include or are there copyright things to watch out for?"
Karen: Okay. So, in terms of integrating videos that are from YouTube, first of all, the thing you're doing is linking, right? You're embedding a video, but it's only a link. You're not actually downloading the video and uploading it to your platform, which has a whole different copyright assessment attached to it. So, we are not making a copy, we are making a fancy link. And so, when the video disappears from YouTube, the link disappears. It doesn't work anymore. However, you are expected to do your due diligence and if someone's sharing a Disney video on YouTube, it's not going to be legal, right?
So, do your due diligence in checking whether that video is likely to be legally uploaded. It's even better if you choose some that are openly licensed, right? That's what I would recommend. And often you can find things, but because we're just linking, we're not actually making a copy of the work. And so, the copyright assessment is quite liberal.
Jessica: All right. Kate, would you like to ask your question?
Kate: I would. I have two questions. So, the first one is kind of about versioning. Do you take whatever published materials you create and put it in some type of institutional repository or do you let it be on its platform? That's my first question.
Karen: A lot of our Pressbooks are in our institutional repository because we're trying to show faculty work, but they are only on there as a PDF file. And it is mentioned when that PDF file was created and the version as of this date, and then there's a link to Pressbooks like, "For the most current version, please go here." We have not yet gone back into our IR and updated all those links, but we're currently migrating to a new platform, and so, I will actually go back and take that as an opportunity.
So, I know a lot of people with their IR are only putting in items that always stay the same or that are always there. We are a little bit more liberal with ... I'm okay with taking an old version down and uploading the new one, right? It's not an archive for us. But yeah, it's up to you really what you want to do with that. Of course, it's a PDF, so there's not as much as you can do with it as with the EPUB online.
Kate: Right. Thank you for that. Would you mind a second question or do you want to go to somebody in the chat? Okay.
Jessica: Go ahead.
Kate: So, I've worked with a couple of faculty who, they've signed up to write a textbook, but then in the way that we frame the conversation, we're compensating them for writing the textbook, not for redesigning their course. So, they find that when they are... Even just when we're swapping out a textbook, you pull one thread and then you kind of have to do everything else all over again. Could you talk a little bit about how you frame that conversation about writing the textbook, redesigning your course?
Karen: Yeah. So, we do also, we get that question as well, right? Some people come to us and say, "I want to redesign my course. And with that I'm writing an open textbook." Some of them are just like, "I'm just going to write this introduction to criminology because it doesn't exist as an OER. We're all using this other textbook and we're just going to put it in there."
Luckily, we have instructional designers that we can refer to. So, when someone comes to the project like that, we do warn people that this is what likely will happen, but also, we emphasize them trying the teaching out over time with this new material. Right? So, there's not always a strict switch from one to the other immediately. We're just saying you can iterate, you can try and add different things. You can try and add bits. But yeah, they do need to be aware that work can spiral, for sure. And the grant funding is, like you said, only for developing the textbook. There are other grants that they can apply for to get help redesigning their course. So, we're lucky in that effect, although not right now.
Jessica: All right. We've had a flurry of comments in there and I'm going to try and pick out the ones that are questions. So, a great question here. "What do you do with bad peer reviews, are all published automatically?"
Karen: So, you mean the peer reviews are published?
Jessica: I think if all the books... My interpretation is all the books published, even if they receive bad peer reviews.
Karen: Oh, I mean, if they receive really bad peer reviews, then we would ask the authors to change. If it's really terrible, if people are like, "This is horrible. This is awful." I hope that they would also give some suggestions and feedback on how to make it better. Right? Because if we're doing peer review at the stage where it's not officially published yet, that is an opportunity for the author to make some more changes. Right?
We have not yet encountered a situation where it was so bad and couldn't be changed anymore that we wouldn't publish it, luckily. I think there would definitely be a point where we can just be like, "Well, sorry. You are welcome to use this in your course, but we're not going to add it to our catalog." We have actually done that with one previous work that where the person just didn't listen to the accessibility requests and requirements and we were like, "No, this is not getting our logo on it. This is not going in our catalog." It's a hard thing to tell someone. You have to be really diplomatic about it. But if you have those things written out, if you have those policies and guidelines from the beginning, it's much easier to point to them and be like, "Well, you failed these markers of quality, so this needs to be improved upon before we can move forward."
Jessica: And there are a couple of comments in there as well from Cheryl and Amanda following up on that question. I think that's a really interesting question there. Next, a comment from Rachel, "I had a faculty member specifically request professional copy editing and figure design, and I was pleased at their awareness and happily had already set up a process to provide services, although it added five to seven months and cost to the project. Even if we can offer copy editing and other services, they may not be at the highest professional level in smaller publishing programs."
Karen: Yeah. We're very lucky that we have contracted with an external professional copy editor who's very fast, very reasonably priced, and is doing really good work. But we didn't always have that. And so, then sometimes the copy editing was done by me ,because I'm trained as a copy editor as well. And that's terrible. Don't do that.
Jessica: I am too. And yes, I've tried to avoid it as much as possible. From William, "Open pedagogical elements sound like a great way to embed OER content to courses and get value from the text and content being created. Do you find that instructors are interested in this as a form of review or are they keen on full peer review?"
Karen: It's really a mix. Some of our instructors really want the official full peer review, and a lot of them are just really happy to just start teaching with it, develop based on student feedback, maybe send it to two colleagues who can give them suggestions, but it's really mixed. I find that publishers, not publishers, authors when they're publishing an OER are often more willing to think about alternative ways instead of going through a traditional commercial publisher with their book, their baby, their main work that they're writing in their subject area, where they want things to be much more traditional. Right? So, the closer you are to traditional kinds of publishing, the more expectations authors will have of things going in a particular way and being much more keen on the very more prestigious kind of peer review.
Jessica: Okay. We have a couple minutes left. I don't see any more questions, but I'll just draw people's attention to some points in the chat. So, Amanda shared an example of versioning. Daniel is talking about copyrighted videos that are being uploaded, which can cause copyright strikes at the YouTube level, which is a great thing to-
Karen: Yeah. Especially the music. Yeah, absolutely. So, you have to do your due diligence, for sure, with videos.
Jessica: Yeah. Cheryl brings up a good point that with YouTube videos, we are seeing them disappear because of all kinds of different issues. So, making sure that we're building in reviews of links, Amanda brings up link reviews, I think is super important. And then one last question, "How would OPUS conduct their post-publication step in the workflow, gathering usage data and metrics?"
Karen: So, right now, we are in between metrics platforms, and so right now we're just using the Pressbooks metrics that you can get. This will be an excellent question from my colleague Amanda, actually, because she's in charge of doing those kinds of things. But we are moving in between platforms and looking at something that will give us the kind of usage metrics that faculty actually want. Right? How many people are reading the book from particular areas? How many people are using it, downloading it? Things like that. Can't give you a very concrete answer to that one.
Jessica: I think we have maybe one last question here, "Does OEN have any copy editing services or contractors built in?" I'm not sure of the answer for that, that's something that we may need to follow up with later on.
Amanda: That's a great question for Karen Lauritsen...
Jessica: Yes.
Amanda: ...when she gets back. In the past, there was, you could contract with Scribe as part of the OEN Publishing Cooperative. I'm not sure what that looks like anymore, but they're lovely to work with. But we will save that and have Karen answer that question.
Jessica: Definitely. All right, and we are right out of time. So, thank you so much to Karen for the presentation today. I think obviously you can tell from the chat that we had a lot of thinking and questioning around that, a lot of reflection, and I really appreciate sharing your experience with us today.
So, thank you all for joining us for this session and I hope that you'll be back with us next week for the next session. We recommend reviewing unit two to prepare for our creating inclusion session next week. I hope you all have a great week and we'll see you next Wednesday.
Karen: Thanks, everyone.
END OF VIDEO
Chat Transcript
13:01:08 From Amelia Brister to Everyone: Alaska - cruisin'
13:01:14 From Karen Meijer to Everyone: My brother and fam is coming to visit from the netherlands
13:01:17 From Geoff Carr to Everyone: Might go to GenCon during the summer. Other than that, I've got OER adapting to get done.
13:01:18 From Daniel DuPont to Everyone: my kid wants to go to the beach, but I am a forest person
13:01:20 From Micah Gjeltema to Everyone: Road trip to camp in Glacier National Park!
13:02:02 From Seyed Abdollah Shahrokni to Everyone: I'm thinking about taking a train trip from Texas to Washington, with several stops on the way.
13:02:23 From Lora Largo to Everyone: Family visit...may be short road trips.
13:02:25 From Anna Uribe to Everyone: Officiating my friend's wedding in Bosnia
13:03:11 From Emily Mineart to Everyone: No vacation plans here. Just short antiquing road trips.
13:04:26 From Jessica McClean to Everyone: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1l5A2okUKSVi0SqzoYELjYnsTs7DResOf6zwdr2oU14A/edit?tab=t.0#heading=h.o6l9eukyoio4
13:05:31 From Geoff Carr to Everyone: Nothing...since I'm the author/adapter and I'm helping myself.
13:05:33 From Christine Rickabaugh to Everyone: Lots of things- where to begin, how deep to go, how to present content, not knowing the content area....
13:05:35 From Cheryl Casey to Everyone: Time-consuming support they request
13:05:48 From Daniel DuPont to Everyone: my lack of knowledge about their topic getting in the way of creating the textbook
13:05:48 From Anna Uribe to Everyone: Finding accessible OER to adapt
13:06:06 From Kate Farley to Everyone: Managing expectations about the focus of the textbook (what should go in the book, what could/should go in the LMS, how to support versioning/dynamic updates).
13:06:10 From Emily Mineart to Everyone: Understanding norms and expectations among faculty. (Librarians are not faculty here, but staff)
13:06:10 From Joelle Thomas to Everyone: Managing expectations, especially about feasible timelines
13:07:05 From Jessica McClean to Everyone: https://www.menti.com/
13:07:13 From William Peaden to Everyone: At present it is going to be making sure that product is good and as usable as a vendor book
13:07:46 From Emily Mineart to Everyone: thank you for the link!!!
13:08:01 From Caitlin Cooper to Everyone: I helped some history instructors lightly adapt an American History textbook.
13:09:34 From Caitlin Cooper to Everyone: I always liked questions at the end and little knowledge check quizzes. Definitely pictures and graphics.
13:41:49 From Amanda Larson to Everyone: Here's an example of a spreadsheet you can use to track licenses for resources being used to make an OER - https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/18ml97hC9uDWyMt4TsBe878VZNnjy-xISBpOcUYke7R8/edit?usp=sharing
13:46:08 From Stephanie Wiegand to Everyone: What is an appropriate average amount to pay to a peer reviewer?
13:48:20 From Seyed Abdollah Shahrokni to Everyone: What’s your take on embedding videos in OER books. For exampole, if a video’s on YouTube, does that usually make it okay to include, or are there copyright things to watch out for?
13:49:22 From Jessica McClean to Everyone: H5P content type accessibility list: https://help.h5p.com/hc/en-us/articles/7505649072797-Content-types-recommendations
13:50:22 From Amanda Larson to Everyone: Not A Lawyer but - In the US you can always link to videos - autoembed like Pressbooks does is usually fine. You need to have transcripts.
13:50:38 From Amanda Larson to Everyone: Its great if they already have captions
13:51:01 From Amanda Larson to Everyone: We also encourage folks to filter by license on YT
13:51:25 From Stephanie Wiegand to Everyone: What do you do with bad peer reviews? Are all published automatically?
13:51:44 From Rachel Fleming to Everyone: I had a faculty member specifically request professional copy editing and figure design, and I was pleased at their awareness, and happily had already set up a process to provide services-- although it added 5-7 months (and cost) to the project. Even if we can offer copyediting and other services they may not be at the highest professional level in smaller publishing programs.
13:51:50 From William Peaden to Everyone: Open pedagogical elements sound like a great way to embed OER content to courses and get value from the text/content being created. Do you find that instructors are interested in this as form of review or are they keen on "full peer review"?
13:51:59 From Amanda Larson to Everyone:
https://ohiostate.pressbooks.pub/choosingsources/back-matter/version-history/
13:52:32 From Amanda Larson to Everyone: An example of versioning
13:52:36 From Daniel DuPont to Everyone: and if you upload a video to youtube that violates copyright (for instance has copyrighted music in the background) to link in your OER, you may get a "copyright strike" at youtube, which is a step towards being banned from youtube
13:52:56 From Cheryl Casey to Everyone: Replying to "What do you do with bad peer reviews? Are all publ...":
We don't publish the peer reviews - we use them internally to guide changes by the author(s). We do credit the peer reviewers in the Pressbook.
13:53:56 From Daniel DuPont to Everyone: youtube will copyright strike fair use material, and it is an uphill battle fighting that
13:54:04 From Cheryl Casey to Everyone: Another challenge with YouTube videos is that they can disappear at a moment's notice. We've been seeing this happen with DEI-related content by government agencies.
13:54:53 From Amanda Larson to Everyone: Replying to "What do you do with bad peer reviews? Are all publ...":
Publishing would mean you're doing open peer review. You'd want to have a set of policies in place for how you would handle that. I'd recommend having a typical rubric that folks fill out and share that publicly and still provide away for constructive criticism to happen that isn't published.
13:57:49 From Amanda Larson to Everyone: Replying to "Another challenge with YouTube videos is that they...":
It's important to build in regular link reviews - just to avoid link rot in general, but even more so now as things are disappearing.
13:58:20 From Seyed Abdollah Shahrokni to Everyone: How would OPUS conduct their post-publication step in the workflow (gathering usage data and metrics)?
13:59:23 From Kate Farley to Everyone: Does OEN have any copy editing “services” or contractors built in?
13:59:40 From Amanda Larson to Everyone: Pressbooks has built-in KoKo Analytics. It's pretty awesome for cursory data.
14:00:24 From Stephanie Wiegand to Everyone: Thank you!!!
14:00:27 From Seyed Abdollah Shahrokni to Everyone: Thank you so much, very very helpful.
14:00:35 From Amanda Larson to Everyone: Thank you, Karen!!!
14:00:43 From Kate Farley to Everyone: Thank you!
14:00:46 From Lora Largo to Everyone: Thank you for this informative presentation.
14:00:49 From Cheryl Casey to Everyone: Replying to "Does OEN have any copy editing “services” or contr...":
I've used the Editorial Freelancers Association
13:01:14 From Karen Meijer to Everyone: My brother and fam is coming to visit from the netherlands
13:01:17 From Geoff Carr to Everyone: Might go to GenCon during the summer. Other than that, I've got OER adapting to get done.
13:01:18 From Daniel DuPont to Everyone: my kid wants to go to the beach, but I am a forest person
13:01:20 From Micah Gjeltema to Everyone: Road trip to camp in Glacier National Park!
13:02:02 From Seyed Abdollah Shahrokni to Everyone: I'm thinking about taking a train trip from Texas to Washington, with several stops on the way.
13:02:23 From Lora Largo to Everyone: Family visit...may be short road trips.
13:02:25 From Anna Uribe to Everyone: Officiating my friend's wedding in Bosnia
13:03:11 From Emily Mineart to Everyone: No vacation plans here. Just short antiquing road trips.
13:04:26 From Jessica McClean to Everyone: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1l5A2okUKSVi0SqzoYELjYnsTs7DResOf6zwdr2oU14A/edit?tab=t.0#heading=h.o6l9eukyoio4
13:05:31 From Geoff Carr to Everyone: Nothing...since I'm the author/adapter and I'm helping myself.
13:05:33 From Christine Rickabaugh to Everyone: Lots of things- where to begin, how deep to go, how to present content, not knowing the content area....
13:05:35 From Cheryl Casey to Everyone: Time-consuming support they request
13:05:48 From Daniel DuPont to Everyone: my lack of knowledge about their topic getting in the way of creating the textbook
13:05:48 From Anna Uribe to Everyone: Finding accessible OER to adapt
13:06:06 From Kate Farley to Everyone: Managing expectations about the focus of the textbook (what should go in the book, what could/should go in the LMS, how to support versioning/dynamic updates).
13:06:10 From Emily Mineart to Everyone: Understanding norms and expectations among faculty. (Librarians are not faculty here, but staff)
13:06:10 From Joelle Thomas to Everyone: Managing expectations, especially about feasible timelines
13:07:05 From Jessica McClean to Everyone: https://www.menti.com/
13:07:13 From William Peaden to Everyone: At present it is going to be making sure that product is good and as usable as a vendor book
13:07:46 From Emily Mineart to Everyone: thank you for the link!!!
13:08:01 From Caitlin Cooper to Everyone: I helped some history instructors lightly adapt an American History textbook.
13:09:34 From Caitlin Cooper to Everyone: I always liked questions at the end and little knowledge check quizzes. Definitely pictures and graphics.
13:41:49 From Amanda Larson to Everyone: Here's an example of a spreadsheet you can use to track licenses for resources being used to make an OER - https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/18ml97hC9uDWyMt4TsBe878VZNnjy-xISBpOcUYke7R8/edit?usp=sharing
13:46:08 From Stephanie Wiegand to Everyone: What is an appropriate average amount to pay to a peer reviewer?
13:48:20 From Seyed Abdollah Shahrokni to Everyone: What’s your take on embedding videos in OER books. For exampole, if a video’s on YouTube, does that usually make it okay to include, or are there copyright things to watch out for?
13:49:22 From Jessica McClean to Everyone: H5P content type accessibility list: https://help.h5p.com/hc/en-us/articles/7505649072797-Content-types-recommendations
13:50:22 From Amanda Larson to Everyone: Not A Lawyer but - In the US you can always link to videos - autoembed like Pressbooks does is usually fine. You need to have transcripts.
13:50:38 From Amanda Larson to Everyone: Its great if they already have captions
13:51:01 From Amanda Larson to Everyone: We also encourage folks to filter by license on YT
13:51:25 From Stephanie Wiegand to Everyone: What do you do with bad peer reviews? Are all published automatically?
13:51:44 From Rachel Fleming to Everyone: I had a faculty member specifically request professional copy editing and figure design, and I was pleased at their awareness, and happily had already set up a process to provide services-- although it added 5-7 months (and cost) to the project. Even if we can offer copyediting and other services they may not be at the highest professional level in smaller publishing programs.
13:51:50 From William Peaden to Everyone: Open pedagogical elements sound like a great way to embed OER content to courses and get value from the text/content being created. Do you find that instructors are interested in this as form of review or are they keen on "full peer review"?
13:51:59 From Amanda Larson to Everyone:
https://ohiostate.pressbooks.pub/choosingsources/back-matter/version-history/
13:52:32 From Amanda Larson to Everyone: An example of versioning
13:52:36 From Daniel DuPont to Everyone: and if you upload a video to youtube that violates copyright (for instance has copyrighted music in the background) to link in your OER, you may get a "copyright strike" at youtube, which is a step towards being banned from youtube
13:52:56 From Cheryl Casey to Everyone: Replying to "What do you do with bad peer reviews? Are all publ...":
We don't publish the peer reviews - we use them internally to guide changes by the author(s). We do credit the peer reviewers in the Pressbook.
13:53:56 From Daniel DuPont to Everyone: youtube will copyright strike fair use material, and it is an uphill battle fighting that
13:54:04 From Cheryl Casey to Everyone: Another challenge with YouTube videos is that they can disappear at a moment's notice. We've been seeing this happen with DEI-related content by government agencies.
13:54:53 From Amanda Larson to Everyone: Replying to "What do you do with bad peer reviews? Are all publ...":
Publishing would mean you're doing open peer review. You'd want to have a set of policies in place for how you would handle that. I'd recommend having a typical rubric that folks fill out and share that publicly and still provide away for constructive criticism to happen that isn't published.
13:57:49 From Amanda Larson to Everyone: Replying to "Another challenge with YouTube videos is that they...":
It's important to build in regular link reviews - just to avoid link rot in general, but even more so now as things are disappearing.
13:58:20 From Seyed Abdollah Shahrokni to Everyone: How would OPUS conduct their post-publication step in the workflow (gathering usage data and metrics)?
13:59:23 From Kate Farley to Everyone: Does OEN have any copy editing “services” or contractors built in?
13:59:40 From Amanda Larson to Everyone: Pressbooks has built-in KoKo Analytics. It's pretty awesome for cursory data.
14:00:24 From Stephanie Wiegand to Everyone: Thank you!!!
14:00:27 From Seyed Abdollah Shahrokni to Everyone: Thank you so much, very very helpful.
14:00:35 From Amanda Larson to Everyone: Thank you, Karen!!!
14:00:43 From Kate Farley to Everyone: Thank you!
14:00:46 From Lora Largo to Everyone: Thank you for this informative presentation.
14:00:49 From Cheryl Casey to Everyone: Replying to "Does OEN have any copy editing “services” or contr...":
I've used the Editorial Freelancers Association
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