Pub101 for Authors: Working in Teams

Our latest session of Pub101 for Authors examines Working in Teams with Michigan State University colleagues, Linda Miles and Rajiv Ranjan. The two discuss common open textbook creation processes, explore the teamwork approach, and consider how a community of practice adds value. They also review tools and workflows, identify early conversations to have with collaborators. and offer insight to help you navigate inevitable challenges, including time constraints, miscommunication, and differences of opinion. Hosted by University of Arkansas' Christine Rickabaugh. 

Watch the video recording of this April 29, 2026, session or keep reading for a full transcript.

Christine: Hi, everyone, welcome to the Open Education Network's Pub101 for Authors. Thank you for joining us for today's session. My name is Christine Rickabaugh and I am the open education librarian at the University of Arkansas and I'll be the facilitator and host today. Soon, I'll be handing it off to Rajiv Ranjan, associate professor in the Department of Linguistics, Languages and Cultures at Michigan State University and Linda Miles who's the open educational resources librarian from Michigan State University to talk about working in teams. We'll have time for your questions and conversation and there may be those 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.

Just a couple of quick housekeeping notes. These sessions complement our Pub101 for Authors curriculum and related resources. Today's session complements unit three, developing your open textbook and you can access our curriculum online and I just put a hyperlink there. If you have an orientation document that includes our schedule and links to session slides, if you can't make it to a session and want to know what you missed, please check the orientation document and I'll put that link in the chat as well. We are committed to providing a friendly and welcome environment for everyone aligned with our community norms, please join us in creating a constructive space.

So, to kick off today's session, we have a brief reflective question. So, what questions or concerns do you have about creating an open textbook especially about working with others to do so? And you're welcome to unmute or put your answers in the chat. Okay, so we've got some questions. My question or concern is, seriously, how long will all of this take and, while having others increase or decrease this time. Gary, depends on who you're working with would be my answer because some people you will work with will make it take longer and some will make it go faster. So, Karen wants to know how do I stay friends with everyone because, yes, maintaining those relationships is definitely a key one. Jonathan's wondering about finding viable sources.

So, I have a feeling that Linda and Rajiv have some responses to some of this and we'll definitely keep going. Oh, and Matthew wants to know what are some of the basic open resources for facilitating co-authoring that port well into the different formats and stay within the boundaries of accessibility. And we'll have to see what they have to share about some of those things. So, we've got our set going and I'm going to go ahead and stop talking and hand it over to Linda and Rajiv to share a screen and share their wisdom with us.

Rajiv: Well, go ahead.

Linda: Thanks. Yeah, thanks so much, Christina, we really appreciate being here and we're looking forward to this very, very much. I am Linda Miles, I'm the open educational resources librarian at Michigan State as Christine mentioned and Rajiv, my colleague, I would ask you to introduce yourself again very quickly.

Rajiv: Hello, everyone, my name is Rajiv Ranjan and I teach languages and I train language teachers how to teach their languages and those are my graduate students. And for this presentation, one important part of my introduction would be that we have co-authored 12 books on open education resources thanks to Dr. Linda Miles and six more books are upcoming this summer. And we have 18 books by the end of this year or maybe the fall, we'll have 18 books out on open education resources platform. These all books are on languages, so it's basic in the intermediate, and the advanced in the end. And these books are mostly South Asian, Southeast Asian languages because of the grants and we have collaborated people from all over this country and across the world.

So, we have collaborators from Vietnam, Cambodia, India, so all the various places. So, I hope that our learning in this process will help you guys to raise some more questions because, if there are more questions, there are always going to be possible more answers. So, this is my introduction.

Linda: Thank you. Can you move to the next slide for me, Rajiv?

Rajiv: Yes, yeah.

Linda: So, yeah, so what Rajiv was discussing is the second bullet point on this slide, actually, our less commonly taught languages or, as Rajiv likes to say, least commonly taught languages subject grants. And this was a few federal grants that have been in place, they were in place before I got to MSU so my predecessor was collaborating with Rajiv all the way along on that. And, Rajiv, he really leads a community of practice with the cohorts of authors for those grants but also those authors and Rajiv work very closely with the OER team and I'll direct you to the first bullet point on the slide which is about the MSU Library's OER Award program.

So, we have a team in the library which is myself, I'm a full-time librarian, I used to have a copy editor for 85% of his time but he left the institution and, at this point, we have a part-time copy editor taking up some of that slack. And I have another individual who does a great deal of work on accessibility remediation and directing a student to work on accessibility remediation, I think that's one area where our program really shines under her, that's only 35% of her position here in the library though. And then we have another colleague who does some other collaboration primarily in advising the program but also working on graphic design for the covers of the books and some other clerical things that happen. So, that person does a little bit of that.

That's our OER team, we have an auxiliary team in the library that we lean on which is the MSU Library's Accessibility Unit because they do our accessibility testing. Our project does the remediation in the OER books but they do the testing so that's very, very valuable for us. So, you get a sense of how the two main parts of the project work that we do in OER at MSU and the kinds of relationships that happen across those two programs. We can go on to the next if you like.

Rajiv: Yeah. So, this is, as I mentioned, that we have published 12 books and six more books underway. I'm just picking up an example of Indonesian, Intermediate Indonesian, and just giving an idea what we do and please know that I don't speak Indonesian, I teach Indian Urdu. But I'm the co-author with this and I lead this because this is one of the book that came under our grants. So, a couple of things which we start with, let's say that we decided to go for Indonesian, we had a basic Indonesian textbook authors but those authors are different than these authors. Actually, we had advanced because Indonesian community so they're just the teacher's organizations like Chinese teacher organization.

So, there is a organization called COTSEAL, Southeast Asian Language Teachers Association, and we reach out to the leader and the president and we identify that what's your need right now. And they said we have lots of material for basic Indonesian but there is nothing for advanced and intermediate so we jumped on with the advance first and then we came to the intermediate. So, those two authors were the authors from UCLA and University of Michigan and they were very senior people, we did finish the book but then we wanted to explore new collaborators and we asked them do you want to do the new book or you want to suggest someone else so they suggested.

So, the first place is to identify the authors, then we meet with them, we do the agreement but when, basically, we do the workshops and training in the beginning when they say, yes, we are ready to work with that. So, in that training, Linda Miles and her OER team comes and express all the Pressbook, all the process, the steps and then they go out for summer. So, typically, we do it in May and then, in summer, their job is to give me the structure of the book. Chapters, how many chapters, theme within the chapters, how many sections, within each sections, what are the pre-reading, post-reading, while reading activities, what's your ... So, those questions. But please know that, these language teachers, they don't have PhD in second language acquisition which I have.

So, what I do, they are the native speakers, they have a bunch of experience, there are a bunch of materials but, in order to make a pedagogical sense, we sit together and go through the peer review of the structure of the books. And then there is some ... So, pedagogical, then there is some linguistics. As I said, I don't speak Indonesian so there are few things that they want to go very much grammar, translation method and then some of them want to go 100% communicative. But these books are also for the independent learners so there's a little bit of a functional grammar happening, there are some of the cultural differences that, people within the community, they disagree. For example, in America, we are going to celebrate APIDA month, that doesn't mean that me and another Chinese and Korean person have the same culture but, in America, we all come under the Asian community so even between the co-authors there is some cultural differences.

So, that's where the power dynamics and emotions comes in and I have to mitigate it. And I also very explicitly know that, A, I'm not a native English speaker, B, I'm also a man, C, I also have a PhD and, D, I'm associate professor so I try to listen to them more rather than guide them and speak and say do this, do that. So, then litigity of this comes with the assessment style, how do you assess this, then H5P training, there's a little bit of technology and then, the intellectual property, it is really important. Sometimes they say, "Oh, I have been using this material, can I just put it there in the Pressbook, in a book?" and I say, "But where did you get that material from? If this material is from some other 50-years-old book, you can't put it there, you have to create your own material." So, it's an intellectual property discussion.

And then the real part comes, and we'll talk later about this, is the time difference. So, if I'm collaborating with someone in India or Vietnam and, in the morning, they have a evening, late evening and our evening is their early morning, in the middle of the day, they're sleeping so how do we find a common time where the collaborators are from across the world. And they have lots of other issues like internet is not there, sometimes there's no electricity and stuff like that will talk soon. But so, for this slide, I have this much to share but now the next slide is for Dr. Miles.

Linda: Thank you. Yeah, so this is a very different case study and I'm going to talk a little bit about how the collaboration worked just as an introduction. So, I tend to project manage the work that we do here at MSU, it involves juggling many relationships, being on the same page and tracking tasks and communicating about those tasks across those relationships. With this particular project, there was a lot of one-on-one and group communications with the authors and there were two authors as well so they were navigating a collaboration as well. There was a lot of troubleshooting and a need to check in quite frequently.

So, I know that you all are in different situations than Rajiv and I, all institutions are different, all structures are different so these case studies show how some of the collaboration happens in our particular structure but, as we go through the rest of this presentation, we're going to talk about the possibilities for building relationships in a place that doesn't necessarily have this kind of a support structure already in place because I know that is something that you all are hoping to hear from us today. Next slide.

Rajiv: So, here I'm going to interview Linda Miles and then she can ask me the same question so we are just interviewing each other. So, the first question that goes to Dr. Miles is, if you could collaborate together with those folks again, what would you do differently specifically?

Linda: Okay, yeah. I definitely have an answer for this and it has to do with boundaries. You have to put a balance in place between being incredibly accommodating and saying contact me with any questions, if anything comes up, contact me. This was one particular project where that went to an extreme and it was a little difficult to balance that accommodation with a need to be productive and to be productive for me on multiple projects at the same time while still providing this team, these two individuals with the support that they needed.

Rajiv: So, my answer to that question is I wish I knew the authors beforehand and talked to them mostly to protect them because these authors were a little younger and the culture of the South and Southeast Asia is so much respect. So, if somebody is just a year older than you, you don't speak against them, you just say, yes, ma'am, yes, sir kind of a culture and my authors went little bit under the pressure of their senior colleagues not within the department but within the community of the language teaching. And they were like, "Oh, you got this grant. How much money you're getting? Can you put my name there? Can I give you this material? Oh, I have written this book 25 years ago, take use of it, write my name as a co-author." And those things, I wish I could talk to them a little bit earlier and protect them. And I'm not 80 years old, I'm 40 years old so I didn't have much experience and I come from the same culture where I have a hard time confronting the senior scholars or senior people.

So, I had to talk to them but, if I knew it before and give the clear instructions like putting the blame to the grant, federal government doesn't want anybody, you have signed the documents and this is your project, you can seek help, give them gratitude and thanks but do not try to bring them as a co-authors or anything just because they're not doing anything and they're pulling strength or they're pulling their seniority in it. So, the second question that I...

Linda: Wait, wait, Rajiv. I think, for time, we're going to skip...

Rajiv: Okay.

Linda: I'm going to skip to the last question, and I'll ask you first.

Rajiv: Okay.

Linda: Can you name one thing that really helped make the collaboration a success?

Rajiv: Yeah, I think the best ... And so many events, so many books had different strengths and weaknesses but, for this Indonesian book, I think recognizing their strength and their weaknesses from my side has really helped them, they agreed with me and I began with sharing my weakness and my strength. So, I just put it first on the table and we do the biweekly meetings so, every two weeks, six, seven authors of four different projects are meeting and they're all saying, "Okay, where did you fail? Let's talk about the failure first, what happened?" Like, "Oh, my basement is flooded." Okay, things are not happening, we just came from outside of the project talk then inside and then I made myself more vulnerable and that really helped them to open up to me and help me help them. So, Linda, your answer.

Linda: Yes. So, one thing that really helped make this collaboration on that trailbuilding book a success was that everyone involved was really invested in the goal, saw the value of the project. This had even been articulated a little bit early in the process, I know my team members and I know about their commitment to OER but I had not realized necessarily at the beginning the co-author's investment in their content and in their desire to reach their students with this material. So, really, that shared investment in the final goal was really important.

So, now it's your turn. We would like you all to take a moment and, in the chat, put in a response to this prompt. What is one key challenge, lesson learned or observation you can share about any curricular or academic collaboration that you've been involved in? It doesn't have to be OER related.

Christine: Oh, we've got Amanda pointing out a key one, structure is important.

Rajiv: Mm-hmm, yeah.

Christine: And I'll go ahead and put my two cents in and add to that and say structure but also knowing what your roles are, understanding those different pieces which Justin mentions memorandum of understanding. Yeah, I ask my authors to sign a memorandum of understanding provided by the OEN that just clearly lays out who does what and whose responsibility is what.

Rajiv: Yeah.

Christine: Karen has pointed out, can't communicate too much. Even when you think you've said it too many times, say it again because someone probably didn't hear it.

Rajiv: Agreed, agreed.

Christine: Gary said there were decisions made and then, when the write-up was done by one of the colleagues, the decisions were suddenly different from what everyone had said. Melissa's piggybacking on Karen saying using a communication platform like Teams to keep everything organized. And Eric is suggesting one challenge is, I have to avoid taking over to ensure that something will actually get done. Conversely, our department works better and more efficiently when someone can come to the table with a completed plan, resource or strategy.

Linda: Yeah, that's quite a balance, Eric. Well, thank you everyone for jumping in there, really appreciate it. These challenges can be tough and we're going to, I think, get to some of how that can work.

Rajiv: Yeah.

Linda: Okay. So, we're going to talk about one way to think of how to connect with collaborators. And, for me, that is to think about relationships and roles that are based on the skills and tasks that may be needed for this kind of work. So, on this slide, I have listed some of the key tasks that are involved, generally speaking, in open educational resources project. First, we have outlining the content and matching that content to the learning outcomes of the course. Identifying, selecting, learning a platform or technology that could host the material. Creating and adapting content, reviewing and editing, ensuring accessibility, licensing and publishing and marketing the access. So, these are some of the things that we go through when we put together OER materials and I'll go through these one at a time and talk about the skills involved.

So, if we say outline content and match to learning outcomes of the course, then the kinds of skills that that person might have to bring to the table are expert content knowledge and possibly pedagogical and instructional design expertise. So, remember, we're trying to identify people in our network who might be good collaborators based on the kinds of tasks we need to do for the OER. So, if you can find someone who has one or more of the skills that are relevant, pulling them into your project might be a good idea. Let's go on to the next one.

Identify, select or learn a publication platform. The kinds of skills that make someone really good at this kind of work are possibly familiarity or experience with the specific tool, that could happen or, alternatively, a facility with learning and testing new technologies. An understanding of the available funds if you're actually looking for something to adopt that may have a cost attached to it. An understanding of the technology requirements, if it's something that needs to be integrated into what's happening at your institution and in your course, you may find somebody who knows a little bit about that technology landscape at your institution who can help you with this particular task.

Rajiv, let's go on to three. Create, adapt or input content. Some of the skills are, obviously, expert content knowledge, familiarity with sources for great openly licensed content. So, if you have someone, a colleague at your institution or even at another institution who may have knowledge of the openly licensed content that's already available in your discipline, connecting with that person might be a good idea. Familiarity with the open licensing schema like creative comments licenses, excellent written communication, graphic design skills, familiarity with pedagogical principles as these relate to textbook layout. And this is a big one for us, the idea of giving a learner a consistent experience with the way the materials are visually presented online. If someone has some familiarity with how that relates to learning, that can be really valuable. And then facility with a platform or tools that you are using.

Number four, reviewing and editing. Attention to detail and excellent written communication. If you can find someone with those two skills, they can help you with this task. Ensuring accessibility. This can be a little tricky. As I mentioned, here at MSU, we are a little bit spoiled in that we have an accessibility team who helps us with that and a number of people working on that for us within the OER program. But if you know of someone who has familiarity with accessibility standards for digital content, maybe someone at your university, maybe a colleague that you know from a different institution. Experience with accessibility testing tools, facility with  HTML or CSS coding or facility with the specific platform that you're using, any of these, it doesn't have to be all of them, if they have one of these things, they could be helpful in this particular task.

Licensing and publishing. Again, familiarity with the licensing schema like Creative Commons and maybe facility with a platform that you're using in order to apply the license within that platform, something like that. Next up, marketing access. So, for me, this means in addition to letting the instructors teaching in that discipline in my institution know about the material being available but there are also different indexing sites where people go to look for openly licensed material and I want to make sure that our materials are listed there. And there are also relevant listservs, email listservs that I might want to post to so that folks who might be on the lookout for intermediate Indonesian, Rajiv, might see it there in the listserv.

Rajiv: Yeah. So, I'm going to talk a little bit about the workflows and tools that aid in our collaboration so let's start with the communication. We start with the emails because we are identifying the authors then, if it is within the MSU community, we have a great Teams like the Teams messages we send to ... In one day, Linda and I, we might share 10 Teams messages about the quick things. Slack has been used and I would love you to suggest us if there's another communication tools that you guys have used or have access to, if you can just write in a chat box.

When we do the meeting and they go for the summer after the workshops and training, that's when the structure, the blueprint of the book comes out but then they come back in the fall and they have six months to write the chapter. Please know that, after two chapters, OER team jumps in and give them feedback on those two chapters like what editorial wise they're doing wrong or that could be improved. Rather, they're not writing the headings in a correct font or correct size or there is a copyright issues or there is a pictures available but there's no licensing information underneath that shows that is copyright-free materials and all sorts of things.

So that, authors, those who are writing a book of 10 chapters are not creating this or making the same mistakes. So, in first two chapters, when OER team give them a feedback, then the rest of the six or seven or eight chapters get rid of that silly mistakes that authors ... Authors are just a content person but then the team comes in and make it look good. Just because I speak Hindi doesn't make me the good Hindi book author without the OER team.

And then what we do is a regular schedule for check-ins. So, I mentioned biweekly meetings and these meetings I not do just with those, because of the grant, at any particular time, I'm running four textbooks. So, I have, even if two, minimum two co-authors or three or four co-authors in one given time every biweekly, we have six, seven people, six, seven, but seven people are there biweekly and it really helps and boost each other's energy because some co-authors will say, "Oh, my God, I didn't do much." But it's not shaming but it's saying, oh, but you did something or I struggled here and then, the other person, I had the same issue but I fixed it in this way. So, I'm just the person who has the Zoom link but the conversation goes on among them and, if they need me for pedagogical reasons or any bureaucratic reasons, that's where I chime in too.

Shared access to content in the development. So, not everybody's familiar with the Pressbook, that is our platform but everybody's ... At this age, everybody is okay with the Google Doc so they share the Google Doc or Google Workspace and sometime they just jump on a Pressbook, but I would love to hear from you guys if you have any other platform that you have used with your collaborators other than the Google Doc that just share documents where you can edit together and write the comments and feedback and fix each other things.

It is really important within the co-authors, between the co-authors to have the making delegation of task. So, just I'll give you an example. A person said I'm going to write the content but your task is to create the questionnaires and the questionnaires is about the culture. So, this is an intermediate book so we are going for the ... In language teaching, we talk about the three Ps of the culture, product, process and perspective. So, because this is not advanced book, it's the intermediate book so you have the questionnaires ready for the product of the culture and the process of the culture not the perspective of the culture and then the other person develops it. So, that kind of a collaboration and very clear I'm going to write the content but, when I'm done writing the content, you have to create the questionnaires. Then the third author will take that from a Google Doc and put it in a H5P form. So...

Linda: I'm...

Rajiv: Yeah, go ahead.

Linda: Sorry, I just wanted to jump in and add something that came up this week, in fact, very recently for me. Sometimes when we're working with teams of authors, they'll assign one author to do chapters one, three and five and another author to do two, four and six and one of the things that sometimes gets left behind is the idea of making choices consistently across all those chapters. Because, for the learner, having the content laid out in similar ways and labeled in similar ways and talked about in similar ways and put into the same kinds of sections in each chapter can be very, very helpful pedagogically. And we have had instances where we've had to have authors go back and do a lot of work comparing their material to the other person's material to make some decisions for consistency. So, that also is part of what has to be negotiated in this delegation of tasks. Sorry, Rajiv, I jumped right on in there.

Rajiv: No, that's okay. No, no, no, no, that's great. And then the meeting, as I mentioned, we meet across the states and beyond so we have, thanks to Zoom, we are in the Zoom era so Zoom really helps. Sometime Teams really helps because, if it is within the community or within the MSU community, if we are doing ... We have also used Webex but, if you guys have any other suggestions. Skype I try but then a Skype is no more in fashion, those were the pre-COVID video conferencing tools but the Zoom has been really helping.

So, the problem is that the only problem that we had in my collaboration in my humble experience is sometime the countries may not have electricity at that point of time and there's a meeting. Or, if there is electricity and we are meeting in the morning at 8:00 a.m. and they have 8:00 p.m. there and their internet package is gone so they don't have internet package. Or, if they have a internet, it's slow so they cannot share the screen or open the video so we can only hear their voice and all sorts of a nitty-gritty of the, for the lack of the better word, the Third World countries we are collaborating. But they're amazing scholar and content developer but then those are the challenges that I have seen and faced.

The only best way to do this is just not let them freak out and say that's okay, that happens, how about you send me bullet points, what you did or where you struggle and we'll just ... So, in advance or they can send an email or text message. The WhatsApp is another good thing that sometime the phone internet thing so they can WhatsApp a video chat with me and they can send their bullet points to me that I can share with everybody else. So, it would be possible that you have a Zoom on one side and then you have my WhatsApp on my phone on the other side and I'm trying to triangulate the conversation and so those are the things that really helped during my work.

Linda: I want to say just ... Sorry, just one more thing about video conferencing. Rajiv had mentioned that we do a review of the project after the authors have done two chapters to give them feedback and, in some cases, we could do that live and in person and I tend to like live and in-person meetings in general but that work works really well during the shared screen video conference because we can pull up the material and we can all see it on our screens. It's so much easier to talk about how the formatting is aligning weirdly between this and this if you can just pull it up for them during the meeting. So, sometimes even when you could meet face-to-face you might want to do that video conferencing trick.

Rajiv: Yeah.

Linda: Now, timelines and check-ins. So, we wanted to talk, there's not a whole lot we can go into because this can be very specific to an institution, to the structure of a program and even to each individual project but there tend to be conversations that happen early and then in the middle and then at the end of projects so we just wanted to introduce those concepts to you. Early conversations, I think, tend to be the most important because that is where we are setting our expectations for each other, not just us for them but them for us. So, clarifying responsibilities and tasks, thinking about those complimentary skills like I can write this text if you can create this activity, clarifying the tool and technology choices based again on the types of experience people might have with different tools. Figuring out a timeline, I think it's good to have at least a tentative timeline that includes how often, when and how you're going to check in with each other.

Intermediate goal setting, I talked a little bit earlier about investment in the final goal but sometimes getting an agreement on what's going to happen in the next two weeks can be really helpful to keep everyone moving ahead. A conversation about how you each like to work or like to communicate. Sometimes we make assumptions about our colleagues that are not necessarily accurate about these two concepts, how they like to work or how they like to communicate. There may be some other things that you have in mind that pop into your mind about what would be an important early conversation and, if you want to pop that in the chat, we would really appreciate it.

So, back and forth conversations during the middle of the project. And Rajiv has talked quite a bit about the check-ins, it's important to be open to emergency check-ins, flexibility because you never know what's going to be ... You can't really plan for all of the communications that are going to be required across a project and the ability to recover and move forward when something unexpected happens and this involves a lot of communication. And, again, if there are any other things that come to your mind about things that you would want to consult with each other about as you're in the middle of the depth of a project, please do share in the chat.

And then, after the project or at the end of the project, it's important to take a deep breath because often there have been conflicts and there have been issues that have arisen in those relationships based on the tensions that are happening with the work that's going forward and it's important to take a breath and to appreciate what you have created together. I think that a postmortem of lessons learned and those unexpected things that did come up, I think that can be so valuable even if you're not going to collaborate with these people again for future collaborations that you may have or future work in OER that you may be doing.

You might want to have a conversation about maintaining or improving or updating the work once it's been published. Depending on how it's being published, you may be in a platform like Pressbooks where changes can be made based on what you learn in class from your students perhaps, based on a change to the content because things happen in the world that need updating and plans for possible future collaborations. Again, any others that come up, please do share.

We're going to interview each other again now pretty quickly because we're coming to the end of our time. And I will say to you, Rajiv, which conversations do you love to have with your collaborators?

Rajiv: I think the conversation I love is biweekly, and my favorite is, tell me where you failed rather than what you ... Everybody doing great, what's happening, where you feel like you're not doing great and everybody becomes like it's the AAA meeting that everybody shares like, "This is my failure, this is my failure. Oh, I didn't do this." So, that's the conversation that I love to have. And in the same breath, if I can tell you the conversation or question that I dreaded the most is when the collaborators or the co-authors are not seeing each other equal and that's where I had to pull some of my ranks a couple of times, not always, but that was my dreaded conversation. Linda, back to you, your answer to this question.

Linda: Yes, of course. So, I was thinking about this and I think one of the things I really love about the discussions I have with the people I'm collaborating with is the fact that I am not usually a subject expert in the subject that they are an expert in and that they are writing about and I think it is really interesting to learn what excites them about their discipline and their courses and their teaching and to learn from them in that way. So, those are the conversations that I love the most. The ones that I dread are ...

Here's just an example, there's lots of conversations that can be uncomfortable when you're trying to manage a project. In particular, this is about when the project is behind and whose responsibilities are not happening in a timely manner. Is it because of us on the OER team, is it because of one of the authors and there's a need to cut that with a little flexibility.

So, I mentioned before the balance between accommodation and boundaries and it's this dance again and I think that it's important in our work when we're collaborating with anybody, whether it's the publication team or authors or co-authors collaborating together, I think it's important to set, and I'll always say it with the word tentative, tentative timelines and talk about responsibilities. It's important to be accommodating when unexpected things happen and to be flexible but you also, as a project manager in my case, have to keep the project moving forward so those are always really uncomfortable conversations.

Yeah. And we'd love to see in the chat, if you would please, one strategy that you would employ for hard or uncomfortable conversations with a collaborator.

Rajiv: Should we wait or should I go on and they would write in the chat?

Linda: I think I would wait. There's another section to our slides that talks about some challenges and best practices but you can visit those after. I know we're almost to the end. Christine, would you go through a little bit of what we've got here?

Christine: Yeah. We're looking at a couple of different things. We did talk about Asana which is a design communication product that Karen likes to use when using design products and then we're definitely talking about the hard conversations. Melissa suggests, if it's in person, to have snacks on hand. I hadn't thought of it but I really like it. Christopher said don't put it off, it can become 10 times worse if you do. I noted, when I have those hard conversations, I like to acknowledge that we're all human and life is going to happen to us just because I think it sets it. Karen pointed out a statement like I think we both want X and Y, is that the case, that consensus building. And then Gary pointed out patience is key. And Matthew said situate the conversations with your own pronouns, be open to be wrong.

Linda: I love that, these are all really great strategies. Karen, coming back to what we both agree we want is really an excellent reminder, excellent reminder. Yeah, can you just page through these quickly so that the conversation can move on? So, you could see...yeah.

Rajiv: Yeah. So, challenges that I've already mentioned, the challenges about time constraint, unexpected delays that happens, need to troubleshoot surprises, life happens in between the projects. So, that's technology challenges, I mentioned time zone, miscommunication, difference of opinion, these are the ... One other thing I want to add, and this is probably not very academic, but this I had to deal with this recently a lot is the visa status of the person that I'm collaborating with and what federal grants allows and what visa. And, ethically, I should not be asking the authors before bringing them on my project that what kind of visa you hold. But most of the teachers are mostly on the different kinds of visas and some visas allow them to do a little bit of project work, to get little money, some visa doesn't allow them.

And this is really uncomfortable conversation in the beginning but, once they've done the work and then the fiscal officers, my finance officers goes and say, "Okay, I have to send you this money for your work, can you send me this form and that form?" and then they figure out, "Dang, we cannot pay you. " So, how do you maneuver and the different universities and department had different HR rules and policies and that has been one of the nightmare for me to figure out. So, then I learned the lesson that I talked to the department chair first that, let's say, that Eric is agreeing to collaborate with me and say, "Eric, who is your boss, let me send an email and you can go and talk and this could be intellectual property and it's your property. It's not about payment, it's not salary, it's the intellectual property that we are creating." Anyway-

Linda: Can you go to the next, to the orange one? Because I want to introduce this question. I don't know- ... Christine ... Not this one but the next one.

Rajiv: Okay. Here?

Linda: Yes, because this, I think, is my favorite question that we came up with for this presentation. And I don't know, Christine, if we have any time to have folks think about this but I want to leave you with this question at least. How does taking a collaborative approach add value to the OER work we do? That is my question for you. How does collaboration add value to the work that we do in OER?

Rajiv: And should I stop sharing and open the question?

Christine: Yeah, I think that sounds like a good plan because I think this is a great place to stop.

Linda: There are some resources on the next slide too so you might want to take a look at those when you have a chance.

Rajiv: All right.




END OF VIDEO