Pub101 for Authors: Project Management

Join host Melissa Chim of Excelsior University as she welcomes Penn State colleagues Dr. Bryan McGeary, Julie Meyer, Dr. Michael Polgar, and Wade Shumaker for an insightful discussion of OER project management at this week's Pub101 for Authors. You'll learn to define core principles, understand how openness influences planning and workflows, compare and contrast strategies for balancing flexibility and accountability, and apply collaboration techniques to manage multi-stakeholder projects effectively, and much more.

Watch the video recording of this April 22, 2026, session or keep reading for a full transcript.

Melissa: Hello, and welcome to the Open Education Network's Pub101 for Authors. Thank you for joining us for today's session. My name is Melissa Chim, and I am the Scholarly Communications Librarian at Excelsior University. I'll be your host and facilitator for today. And soon, I'll be handing it over to a bunch of great speakers. We have Dr. Michael Polgar, Penn State Hazleton, Professor of Sociology and Holocaust Educator, Dr. Bryan McGeary, Penn State University Park, Open Education Engagement Librarian, Julie Meyer, Penn State University Park, Instructional Designer, and Wade Shumaker, Penn State University Park, Instructional Production Specialist.

Soon, though, I'll be handing it over to them to talk about project management. We will leave time for your questions and conversation. In addition, there may be many of you who have experience with this topic in addition to our guests, and we invite you to share your experiences and resources as well. Here are a few housekeeping details. We have an orientation document that includes our schedule and links to session slides and recordings. If you can't make it to a session and want to know what you missed, please check the orientation document that I could put in the chat in a moment. Slide session recordings and curriculum connections are included in that document. We are committed to providing a friendly and welcoming environment for everyone aligned with our community norms. Please join us in creating a constructive space.

And to kick off today's conversation, we have a brief reflective question, and that is, what tools do you like to use to manage projects and/or collaborations? So please feel free to put your answer in the chat or you can raise your hand, too, whichever you prefer. Oh, Karen says that she uses Asana and Slack and finds them both to be useful. I do, too. Yeah, I know Asana has been around for a while. My institution actually also uses Monday.com. Pretty similar to Asana, a little bit different in terms of the layout, but still very nice... Oh, Gary says that he uses Things and Scrivener on Mac. Very nice. Oh, wait. So it's Slack and Teams. Those are all really good options. I use Teams as well, which is really nice. All right. Well, thank you, everybody, for putting in your answers, and now I will turn it over and we can get started. Thank you.

Michael: Okay. Well, welcome. My name is Dr. Michael Polgar. Everybody calls me Michael, so I hope you will, too. And I'm honored to be part of this training and discussion today. Please feel free to raise your hand and/or interrupt as I go through my presentation. I'll present some slides and I'll involve the members of our team who are here today. We have four members of our team, as you'll see in a moment. And I'll describe our project and a little bit about our project management, and then I look forward to discussion afterwards. So here is the presentation. Can everybody see Pub101 for Authors: Project Management on their screen?

Melissa: Looks good.

Michael: Looks good. Okay, awesome. I haven't used as much of the Zoom as I used to. I've been Zooming less. So welcome once again. My name is Dr. Michael Polgar, and we are here today with four of our administrative team. I'm a Penn State professor. I'm at Hazleton Campus. I teach sociology and Holocaust education, so I see myself as a Holocaust educator. We also have with us today, Bryan McGeary. Dr. McGeary is a librarian, and specifically the Open and Education Engagement Librarian, as you see. Our project manager is here. This is Julie Meyer. She is an instructional designer, and both she and Wade Shumaker work with the Teaching and Learning with Technology Program, which we call TLT as part of the Penn State University Libraries. Julie is a designer, and Wade is a instructional production specialist.

I got started in this project in 2020, as you'll see. And as a Holocaust educator, I was very interested in doing both authoring content creation and project development in Holocaust education, And I'm a co-editor and an author on the project. This is a link to the project website or to the project textbook itself. And as you'll see, this is the core of our work. It's a textbook for high school and college students called The Holocaust: Remembrance, Respect, and Resilience. We came up with a title in part because my daughter and I were working on a presentation on the Holocaust for her high school group, and I suggested the three R's, Remembrance, Respect, and Resilience. But there are other key themes that we could discuss. It's my pleasure to introduce Dr. Bryan McGeary. Bryan, as I mentioned, is the Open Education Engagement Librarian. Bryan, do you want to say a few words about your role in the project?

Bryan: Sure. I would say one of the main things I did with this project was to help the team navigate questions around copyright, open licensing, and fair use especially. As Michael will explain later, this project involved a very large team of contributors, many of whom weren't even coming from like a higher education kind of background or workplace. And so we certainly didn't expect every member of this team that was contributing to have expertise in fair use and copyright and things like that, but certainly had folks who wanted to incorporate a variety of types of images, multimedia, things like that, representations of the Holocaust or historical images, things of that nature.

Michael: Thanks, Bryan. And of course, librarians are always helpful. So if you're either starting or continuing work on any project, especially an open educational project, we encourage you to work with your local libraries, your regional libraries, your university libraries, and even your collaborative libraries. I've done a little work recently with Library of Congress and other library systems. I think it's really important to know that libraries work with all of us, and the Big 10 itself has a library collaboration also. The Big 10 is not just a sports league. So the instructional designer who coordinated this project is Julie Meyer. She's our project manager. Julie, would you like to say a little bit about your work on the project?

Julie: Sure. So I kind of wore two hats at times as an instructional designer. We worked ahead of bringing on all the team members to create a solid plan and create templates that we used. We worked on an organizational method to share all of our documentation and make sure all of our leadership team had access to the documentation. We worked also together to make sure we had methods of communication and document the communication. And then, we had to be flexible with all the team members because our team was a little different than a lot of OER projects being that most of our leadership teams were from our university, Penn State University, but then we had Suki, who was from another university. And then, all of our contributors were very diverse from all different levels, and not only from the United States, but they were global. So back to you, Michael.

Michael: Thanks, Julie. And of course, what we're doing more generally in educational design, whether we're talking about textbooks or courses or programs, is instructional design. And so it's very important to work with if you have instructional designers available to you at your workplace, at your universities, and other workplaces, to work on designing the educational experience. I do that as a program director in our campus. I do that as a course teacher and also as a content creator for this Holocaust textbook. So thank you, Julie, and thank you, Bryan. Wade Shumaker is an instructional production specialist. He helped us in many ways, including with our platform or the platform that we use, which is called Pressbooks. Wade, would you like to describe your role in the project?

Wade: Absolutely, as soon as I turn my microphone on, which... But yeah, I'm Wade Shumaker. I basically was one of the folks who would take content from the authors and then import them into Pressbooks. We tried to, the best we could, make sure they were Word docs, and not only that, but accessible Word docs because when you have a Word doc accessible and then you import it, a major section of your accessibility is already in there and makes it a lot easier. I would make sure the accessibility of the chapters was good, which included like alt text for images, descriptive links and long descriptions for images that needed more than just like 10 or 20 words from an alt text. Headings have to be sequential, tables have to have header tags and scope, and contrast has to be there.

And if anyone's interested, Pressbooks just recently within the last half a year, added a really strong suite of accessibility tools, which makes everything a lot easier and quicker as opposed to before you'd have to kind of go through all the content and check all these items that I mentioned. But now, they will be pointed out and it's a lot easier to do that and make a lot of better content. So once again, like Julie said, there were many different time zones, so that was always something that was kind of difficult for folks. So if you're working with somebody from Europe or elsewhere, so sometimes you'd be like... Well, it what wasn't real often, we'd have like a 7:00 or 8:00 pm powwow. But all right, yeah, I'll stop yapping.

Michael: No worries. Thank you, Wade. And yeah, there's a link there in the slideshow to Pressbooks. And so having an expert in the technologies that you and your team will use is certainly helpful. And we all learn more as time goes on. We learned about Pressbooks, but also really, I think the authors and editors learned a lot more about Word. We did have people who worked in other writing platforms, and we had other types of projects that were not centered around writing that had AV and other things in them. So our project was a little more multimedia, and so we learned and we made things as accessible as possible. And while we were doing the project, the accessibility software, Pressbooks, as well as Word and other softwares have improved.

I use Canvas on a regular basis, and Canvas for teaching is also now more inclusive of accessibility checks and improvements. The co-creator for this project is Dr. Suki John. She's a professor at Texas Christian University and directs a program or project, I should say, called the Sh'ma Project. Sh'ma's a Hebrew word. It means listen. And the Sh'ma Project is essentially a performing arts piece that Suki developed. Suki is actually also my cousin and our parents were Holocaust survivors together. Our parents were brother and sister. They were child survivors of Bergen-Belsen from Hungary, and they told us to some extent their stories. And then, Suki created a ballet, a narrative dance, about her mother's life before, during, and to some extent after the Holocaust. So Sh'ma is a story really of Suki's mother, whose name is Dr. Vera-John Steiner. The project was initially a choreographed dance piece, and then it was developed into a narrative dance film.

That narrative dance film and its award-winning team are accessible online at theshmaproject.com here. And the Sh'ma Project grew quickly and incorporated our textbook in as educational materials for educators who wanted their students to watch the film, as well as for just general use and interest. The Sh'ma Project has won lots of awards recently, so it's been a real success. And Dr. John was a co-creator, but also a co-editor with me. She edited most of the arts pieces. There were chapters specifically on the arts, some on dance, but also on music, drama, digital media, literature, and many of the different arts. So because Suki was a co-creator, it was a much more interdisciplinary and also, as was mentioned, as Julian and Wade mentioned, it was a global project and we worked with content creators in the arts and in general from all over the world.

So how did we start and how did we develop our project? I must say, I'm not much of a management mindset kind of person. I like things to be organized and I like things to work cooperatively or collaboratively, but I was surprised to be chosen to talk about project management because really it was project design that drove me day to day. I saw myself, and I think Suki as well, as being co-editors and coordinators, but Suki was more of a manager than I was, and she was managing her performance and her film at the same time as we were managing this textbook project. So I was involved in creating a Holocaust textbook of some sort, and the Affordable Course Transformation Project within Penn State Libraries opened up opportunities for many of us initially in 2020. So we initiated this project, this textbook, this OER with the support of this ACT program. We call it a creative collaboration.

That's kind of a way of describing how groups of people work collectively on a project that is not just in the arts, but in the sciences as well, creative. And that's actually the title. Creative Collaboration is the title of Suki's mother's book. Suki's mother, Vera-John Steiner, of memory was a psychologist, and she wrote a book called Creative Collaboration as part of her work at the University of New Mexico. In this collaboration, which ended up being over 30 chapters, probably 40 or 50 authors, also editors, as we mentioned, designers and others, we kind of designed what you might call figuratively a village, and we were guided by a foundation called the Rebus Foundation. Rebus Foundation is celebrating its 10th anniversary this year, and there's a link to it. They teach authors or content creators about how to make an OER. So along with he OEN that you're participating in now, I encourage you to reach out and learn from Rebus.

And then, we built metaphorically a village. We sent out a call for proposals or a call for parts of the text. We did a little networking, which was mostly virtual because it was initially during COVID, and then we participated. Julie Meyer, our project manager, helped create online monthly meetings, and those meetings were educational as well as collaborative. To manage the project, there's a lot that Rebus recommends, and there's a lot that I'm sure the Open Education Network recommends. And of course, there's a whole field of project management with your various softwares and other things. For us, it started with the idea that we're going to have five sections of the textbook.

The five sections were modeled after an Oxford University Press handbook on the Holocaust. So not exactly historical and not exactly temporal, but the sections were kind of an overall structure for the textbook. Each text section had the series of chapters, and we could expand those sections kind of accordion style when we added either a new chapter or other new material. As I mentioned, some of the chapters we called Arts Parts because they were on dance or music or theater or digital media or other arts topics. We really had to be flexible. We adapted to a lot of changes, not just COVID and not just this large-scale collaboration, but as we alluded to, many of our authors were not academic authors. And so it took a little time and persistence and resilience really to finish up most of the chapters that we started on or with.

We needed to be flexible with deadlines. Rebus told us that that would happen. Deadlines are goals, and even if you don't hit deadlines, they motivate. We had to be very flexible with how long these chapters were. Many chapters went over our 4,000-word kind of maximum that we set out in the guidance, and we had to figure out what to do next when that happened. We created a style guide. We updated this style guide a bunch of times, and this guidance document was helpful for authors and editors, but also to increase accessibility and guide people in using technologies.

The technologies we used during the two or three years of initial creation of the project changed because Penn State changed and Penn State's preferred technologies for file storage changed in particular, but every author was in a different learning path when it came to use of technology. And some of the older authors and non-academic authors really needed help, sometimes our help, in both writing and editing in a way that fit the style guidance. We did have to do a little bit of quality control, but we helped each other for the most part. And where we could, we directed people to support and we all needed that support over time. As noted, we had an administrative team at the core that included the people on this Zoom, Julie, Wade, Bryan, also Sara Davis, who's another designer, Communications Professor at Penn State named Rosemary Martinelli, and myself and Dr. Suki John were the co-leads.

You can see the Sh'ma Project link again here, but if you look at the textbook itself, which has the tree icon at the beginning, that's where you see literally 30 chapters, and chapters have one, two, or three authors per chapter, so lots of people involved. We had reviewers at the end and a certain number of advisors to help us. And then, of course, teachers use our chapters, students use our chapters. My students use our chapters for sure, and there are other OER users that are interested in how it's designed, as I hope you are, so we get Pressbook usage statistics.

What's most helpful, hopefully for you, and for all of us, is to do outreach. Call for participation can go through professional organizations. And for us, it was what's called the AHO, the Association for Holocaust Organizations. If I had to start again, I would say use as many professional organizations as you can to reach out and talk with people extensively, one to one when possible, about the nature of the project. Our project was kind of... I guess it was from the goodness of their hearts, all these authors, all these editors, and even Suki and myself, we were doing this not on a paid basis, but as part of our jobs or as part of our professional interests.

So we didn't have a budget, we didn't have a budget administration on all those things. So it's important to let people know that upfront, and sometimes people will not want to participate because they need the money or they need the paid job to do writing or editing, for example. Once you have a agreement drafted for your project, you call it a memorandum of understanding, Bryan referred to it earlier, you want to have fair use. And the fair use, Bryan, do you want to talk a little bit more? Yeah, and thank you, Karen. Karen just put into the chat a link to how to use a memorandum of understanding.

Bryan: As far as fair use and things around copyright and open licensing, I mean, it's important with any size team, but especially a team as large as the team of contributors for this particular project, to have everybody on the same page in terms of what the expectations are for the material that they're creating, that this is going to be openly licensed and kind of making it clear to them what that means, especially with a team that has contributors who are from other countries. May have somewhat different copyright laws than ours here in the United States.

And then, as I mentioned earlier, we had folks who wanted to include materials in their chapters like historical images or maybe media representations of aspects related to the Holocaust. So making sure that if there were any of those kinds of images that weren't openly licensed, that we were navigating that situation properly as far as including items related to fair use, or in some instances, perhaps not being able to do that as well.

Michael: Thank you. Thank you, Bryan. And yeah, the most important thing to know is the Creative Commons is a legal structure openly accessible for any project to make sure that your work is licensed and your authors know the conditions under which their work can be shared out online and used for non-commercial, in many cases, purposes by educational organizations. And there's a lot of understanding, but also a lot of concern about the best use of material, especially when it comes to sensitive material like on the Holocaust. So the memorandum of understanding lays out the expectations for contributors, both the kind of participation expectations, but also the style guide for writing and formatting, accessibility, and so forth. And these role expectations we've kind of touched on briefly for participants are also there in the memorandum of understanding.

To be honest, once people have hit the ground running, the memorandum of understanding is only necessary if there's a problem. It's the beginning, not the end-all of this process. We wanted to make sure people knew their material was subject to editing and updates, and we wanted to make sure our participants were respectful, engaged members of the team, which we had almost no problem with that. So we started 2020 and we learned from Rebus for about six months. We were all online with a variety of U.S. and I think one or two Canadian teams. The project was assisted by Rebus, which was based at that time in Canada, I think still is, in Montreal, and we did a fair amount of kind of project design. As I mentioned, we created the instructions, we coordinated and compiled chapters and sections, and we worked with authors all the way through the next year or two, which was obviously a challenge, but the more information we got, the kind of better our final project could be.

We did work as a team. We released the text, and Suki John released her film as well. We released a text in 2023. I believe the Sh'ma film was released shortly afterwards in 2024, and we celebrated the results of our work and our collaboration. So it was centralized at Penn State a little bit, but we were very cognizant of the fact that authors and collaborators were at other places and had other resources or didn't have other resources, so we had to try to work collaboratively as much as possible. We were very happy to both update things and to keep learning. We had to allow for some differences. We had to allow for stylistic differences because when we got a 5 or 6,000-word chapter that had footnotes, it wasn't immediately clear to me anyway, and this is before AI was advanced, it wasn't immediately clear how to put that back from footnotes into our APA style.

So sometimes we had to go with a chapter that wasn't formatted exactly the same. And then we needed, of course, to market our product. We would bring or I would bring public information to conferences and send out announcements. We shared through our networks and our various channels. We created a website and then we continued to market our product. Again, for all of you who are doing or maybe considering doing a textbook, make sure to update, make sure to make your instructions clear to people. Sometimes collaborators or contributors to a project don't read all the fine print and you need to reinforce it at times. It's always good to work with others and to build a community around your work. Julie did a great job of that by hosting monthly meetings with me, and we appreciate that. So it doesn't have to be a disciplinary endeavor. I'm in social sciences, but I work a lot with people in humanities and also in other areas, history in particular. So make sure to work with colleagues. Some will be in communication, some in business.

My goal was actually at some point to work with people in criminal justice because the Holocaust is a story of criminal behavior and justice as well, although we haven't gotten that far yet. So it's important to be adaptable and flexible. I want to just conclude by saying that the resilience that Holocaust survivors and everybody involved in the Holocaust kind of teaches us is also required for a big project like this. So there'll be difficulties, there'll be challenges, as you know, and we learn from our challenges and move ahead and do what we can do. So we're going to continue to work with project submissions of this, different things that are submitted, to sometimes it's just as simple as a new resource that's come out.

There's been some great new resources in Holocaust studies that I could talk about if you want, but we do continue to keep stats and look for heroes and role models for ourselves and for our students. And one example of that I just put in there at the end is the Holocaust Center of Pittsburgh has a Holocaust heroes comic book series. There are four comics books they've published under a guy named Marcel Walker, and Marcel spoke to my class during COVID. He did a great job coordinating these publications. and students, they love Marvel, but they also love other comic books. So that's just a side note about resources that you can have.

Annual usage, 2024, this was our visitor total and our page view total. That went up in 2025, and hopefully our growth indicates that our text is being used by a larger number of educators and a larger audience. And then, I was asked to conclude with one question, but I, of course, put in more than one, but here are my questions for you all. What are your goals? What are your goals in developing an open textbook? Do you have a structure to support this, an economic structure? And then, how might you organize your project?



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