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Speakers:
Anita: Good afternoon, good morning, good evening. It's nice to be here with all of you today. I'm joining you from Blacksburg, Virginia. We're about four hours south of Washington, DC in the mountains of Southwestern Virginia, and I am thankful that it is a gorgeous day and that we are able to, even though it rained recently, have an in-person outdoor graduation this year.
So please take a moment in the chat to say hi, tell us where you're coming from, and maybe something that you are thankful for. There's a lot going on in our world that is hard, but there's still a lot of things for which to be thankful. So say hi and tell us where you're, and if you want something that you're grateful for, and we'll get started in just a minute.
So I see people from Cleveland, Kalamazoo, Storm Lake, Iowa, Northeastern Ohio, welcome, Atlanta. A really hot day in Natchitoches, Louisiana, and I apologize, I'm saying that incorrectly. Hammond, Naples, welcome. Nice to see all of you here today, and from Philly, and Detroit, and Florida, and I think I missed one, Carbondale, Fargo. Great. Nice to see all of you here. Yes. Good morning. "Aloha," from O‘ahu. Very nice to see you today.
So I'm going to just get started. We have a packed agenda today. So hello and welcome to the Open Education Network's Pub101 and the session on Communication Tools and Strategies for Project Management. Thank you for joining today's session. My name is Anita Walz, and I'm the Assistant Director of Open Education and Scholarly Communication Librarian at the University Libraries at Virginia Tech. I'm happy to be your host and facilitator today.
So after my presentation, I will be handing this off to Mandi Goodsett, who is the Performing Arts and Humanities Librarian and Open Educational Resources and Copyright Advisor, and her colleague, Barb Loomis, who is the Digital Scholarly Publications and Program Administrator, both at Cleveland State University. Yay to you in Ohio. Annie Johnson will be our speaker after that. She's the Associate University Librarian for Publishing Preservation Research and Digital Access at the University of Delaware Library and Press, and Apurva Ashok, who is the Assistant Director and Director of Open Education at The Rebus Foundation.
Each of these people will provide an array of perspectives on working with authors and open publishing, how they've supported authors who are writing open textbooks, including lessons learned and recommendations. As always, we will leave time for your questions and conversation. There may be many of you who have a lot of experience with this topic in addition to our guests, so we invite you to share your experiences and resources. While we will hold questions until the end, please feel free to add them to the chat at any point.
The webinar is being recorded and will be added to our YouTube Pub101 Spring 2022 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.
I'm going talk a bit about working with authors to get us started off. People are important to me, and working with authors is all about respect, transparency, and communication, tools for getting organized, as well as managing expectations. In short, it's about building a productive working relationship to get to an end result. You're not managing authors as much as you're taking the lead and proactively managing your relationship with authors by establishing shared goals and moving a project forward toward the finish line.
So you heard last week from Carla Myers, and I want to reiterate the importance of having agreeing upon and documenting a shared understanding of goals and some non-negotiables, that those two things are really important to any productive working relationship. I've found it's helpful to have this discussion about non-negotiables both yours and your authors before you plunge into a new project. An author may have very strong preferences regarding technology or authoring platforms you may have or your program may have certain requirements for support. So these are really important to talk about. One resource that may have been discussed last week is the OEN's author intake document.
Finally, getting into the author relationship part of things, I want to emphasize that how you work is really important. I always tell authors that what is most important to me is to keep the lines of communication open. Life happens, the good and the bad. People have things come up in their personal and professional lives. They change jobs, their collaborator leaves, they're expecting a baby. I once had a collaborator who was not very communicative. He finally told me, "Oh, I decided to change the project because my collaborator took a job at another institution." I said, "I'm so sorry to hear your collaborator left. How long ago did this happen?" "Oh, four months ago."
So I may have been really limited in my ability to make a difference in his situation, but I didn't know. Since I didn't know, there was nothing that I could have done to assist him in resolving this issue.
So another significant area of working with authors is in assessing feasibility, developing a project plan that's reasonable, and identifying what might be a stretch too far. So I think if you were a librarian like me, you may have a tendency to over serve. I do anyway. I want things to happen so I overextend myself. However, stepping back into a maybe hard and maybe detailed conversation with your author is one way to really consciously assess the feasibility of a project.
Look at your expectations for finishing. What labor or what money is expected? What feels like too much or too fast that could be delegated? Another way of looking at this is looking at the iron triangle of project management, which says that we're constrained by three things, our schedule, our scope, and resources. It said that you can have two of these really good in any project fast, good, and cheap. So naturally, we want all three. So it's helpful to ask ourselves whether we're being reasonable, and if we're not being reasonable, do we need to add more time? Do we need to limit our scope? Do we need to add more money or do we need to change the speed of our expectations?
Finally, as Carla said earlier last week, I put it in writing, have an MOU and maybe have an MOU at some other parties. Why do you need this? Because it's heartbreaking when someone you've worked with so intensively to develop their project signs a publisher agreement without your knowledge. It's happened to me, and it's very difficult.
So feasibility is an ongoing task throughout the project. When you or your author discover all kinds of really cool things that you could add to your scope and are tempted to add them, I want to warn you that boundaries are really good, and it's okay to say no. It's okay to say, "Let's hold that for phase two." It's also okay to say, " Not yet." So boundaries are good, and scope creep is a real thing to both warn yourself and your authors about.
I'd like to talk very briefly about some of the project tools that you may need. I'm going to abbreviate this, but some of the tools you may need are style guides. These can help you to treat similar content in a consistent manner. Other tools for working together are communication plans, finding the best mode of communication, project organization tools. Many of these I commonly build. You might build them yourself. You'll definitely want to maintain some notes about your project, project schedule, a checklist. You can put everything that you need in your own checklist, and you don't have to share it with your authors.
On the relationship side, I'm going to say sometimes authors will resist your efforts to organize the process, and this is because they have their own way of organizing things. So if it works and it doesn't always, but let them organize the parts of the project that they need to organize, but make sure you have access to their systems and their particular documents.
These tools are used between meetings and in meetings, and I know that past speakers have talked a bit about meetings. I want to say one thing is to prioritize your author needs. It's great for you to go into a meeting, have your list of things that you want to talk about, but I always say to people because I don't know their context, "What is helpful for you to talk about today? I have my list of things that I want to talk about, but what do you want to talk about?" because I don't know their particular context.
Finally, sometimes and rather often, things go wrong. It's pretty normal for things to go wrong, for things to pop up that you did not expect. This is normal, and it's actually okay. It happens for lots of different reasons. These are complex projects, but open textbook publishing is really complicated. There are so many pieces that come into it. So it's better to expect and work through these problems than to proceed by working harder without resolving them. It does take time and that's okay, but you're worth it to build, and this work is worth it to build healthier and more sustainable ways of working.
So I look forward to seeing how you build, and I'm happy to field questions in the chat if you want to put some in there. The slides are available to you. I will add the link into the chat. So I'm going to hand this off to Mandi Goodsett and Barb Loomis from Cleveland State University.
Mandi: Thanks, Anita. Thank you. Here we go. All right. Hi, everyone. We are going to be talking about Cleveland State University's experience working with authors. Again, my name is Mandi Goodsett.
Barbara: I'm Barb Loomis.
Mandi: We're going to just give you a very, very brief background about our program. Our Textbook Affordability Grant Program was started in 2016 by our previous Library Director, Glenda Thornton, and we have been offering small grants every spring and fall since then. Most of our projects, honestly, are not from scratch. Original authoring projects, a lot of them are adaptation, projects using existing materials. We have some resources. We have Pressbooks, which is great. We have Barb and myself to work on this in addition to our full-time jobs, and we have a little bit of grant funding.
So basically, what we can share with you is how we try to support faculty authors with modest budget and staffing. So if you're an institution that doesn't have a lot of resources or you're just getting started and it feels overwhelming to have a publishing program, our model might be helpful for you.
So next slide. So just a little bit about our grant process. We start with having faculty fill out an intent to submit form before they even apply to do any kind of authoring project. I got this idea from my colleague, Jessica Kirschner at VCU, and I have found it very, very helpful for us to gauge the viability of a project and have an opportunity to meet with a faculty member and talk through what they want to do before they even apply.
Then we have an initial team meeting with the faculty member, and that includes the subject librarian, one instructional designer, myself as the OER person, and Barb as our Pressbooks coordinator. We leave it up to the faculty member how frequently they want to meet, which really puts them in the driver's seat and helps them take control of the process a little bit, take ownership of it a little bit. Usually, we meet monthly. Sometimes it's less frequently, sometimes it's more frequently. We use Microsoft Teams for project management. So we just create a folder for each faculty member, and I have a document in there for ongoing notes. So every time we meet, I add notes to that document. I also use calendar reminders to check in, and we usually communicate via email or via Zoom.
Barbara: So our digital repository is titled EngagedScholarship @ CSU, and it's where we highlight the scholarly and artistic work of our faculty and students. Here, we also publish open access books and OERs under MSL academic endeavors, the imprint of Michael Schwartz Library. In general, we provide details of our publishing program and our research guide, and I'm available to walk authors through what to expect. We don't provide editing or proofreading as we don't have those resources.
Before we begin the publishing process, the author signs a publishing agreement and is asked what creative comments license they want to assign the book. We take the manuscript and format it in Pressbooks or train the author and allow them to input their work on their own timeline. When it's completely formatted, we assign it an ISBN number, catalog it, link it to Pressbooks, and publish it in our digital repository. Once the book is published, we provide marketing for the book.
After the initial team meeting Mandi mentioned, I schedule a Pressbooks training session with the faculty member, and if they plan to create an ebook. I also set up the shell of the book and add the chapter titles and as many book details as I can. The training usually lasts under an hour, depending on the author, and faculty have either taken to using Pressbooks on their own or they provide me with the Word document and I transfer the book into Pressbooks. I'll provide support all the way through publishing and marketing of the book.
Some alternative formats authors have used are Adobe InDesign for books and Overleaf for math. One faculty member simply used a Word document and converted it to a PDF to create a phonetics workbook for her students. This is a sample of her OER in EngagedScholarship, and she is thrilled that she has received more than 3,000 downloads since it was published in our digital repository in August 2020.
Mandi: So in interest of time, we're really just going to give you, very briefly, some lessons learned. As I said, we don't have a lot of resources so we've learned to do more with less when it comes to supporting faculty. As Anita said, having boundaries is really important. One thing that's been successful for us is partnering with other institutions to provide better support, and we've been really, really fortunate to do one project with Virginia Tech and with Anita. So our faculty and our institutions could provide help for each other and that was a really positive experience.
Obviously, the open community is very sharing and giving, and so there are lots of ideas and documents that others have created that we can then use to help coordinate with faculty. Finally, we worked with an intern this past semester. This was something new that we tried. This was a student really interested in publishing who just really wanted experience. So that was really awesome to have another person to help us out while also giving them the experience that they need. If you have other questions after the Q&A, we would love to talk with you more about our various projects and other details, but for now, we will turn it over to Annie Johnson from University of Delaware.
Annie: Hi, everyone. I don't have slides, so I'm just going to chat with you a little casually, but as Anita said, I am the AUL for Publishing at the University of Delaware Library Museums and Press. I'm actually brand new at UD. I've been in my current role for about a month now. So I'm going to be talking to you about my experience working with authors at my previous institution, which is Temple University in Philadelphia, At Temple, I was the editor-in-chief of North Broad Press, which was a joint library press imprint that primarily publishes open textbooks.
In terms of the structure of the program, we would put out a call for proposals for faculty-authored open textbooks once a year in the spring. Faculty that were selected to publish with us would receive a $5,000 stipend, and that's 2,500 up front and the remainder after they turned in a draft of the manuscript, and that is very important if you're not already doing that, to not give all the entire stipend upfront.
Overall, I would say we provided a lot of support to authors. We helped faculty find openly licensed images. In some cases, we worked to get permission for an image if it was under copyright. We attempted to get faculty to do some of the heavy lifting when it came to accessibility, but ultimately, we frequently ended up doing much of that work, and so by that, I mean, creating alt texts for images.
Other things we did, we managed peer review, copy editing, and type setting. We worked with a third-party vendor to create e-pubs for all of our books, and then we uploaded the book and any supporting materials to our publishing platform manifold. We also arranged for POD copies, which could be purchased at cost.
I would say that we started our program with a plan for how much support we were going to offer authors, but once the manuscript started coming in, we really ended up expanding our support, and that was in large part I'd say because we wanted to put out quality publications. I think maybe I was particularly sensitive to this because of our connection to our university press. So I felt like we couldn't just put out anything. We really had to make sure that these books were good.
I would say for one book, in particular, I ended up doing quite extensive developmental editing, and the time that I invent invested in that book would not have been sustainable if I had to do it for every book. That is the thing that's the rub here is that every book is different, every author is different, which can really make it hard when you're trying to figure out when you're starting a program, how much time are you going to spend on each project.
For folks who are writing drafts, I would generally check in with them once a semester. Once we were in the production stage, Zooms and emails would get a lot more frequent, but it really, really depended on the person. So that's why I wanted to just end by saying that I wanted to share three types of authors that I encountered most frequently in my work. The first and hopefully this will be helpful to you all, but the first author was what you might call the overachiever. These were folks who would write their manuscripts on time. They would need very little help or support from our team. They could be counted on to follow directions. That's a big one. I would say that, generally, these were faculty who had published books before, so they did have experience. They understood how to put a book together from start to finish.
The second type of authors that I encountered a lot were what I would like to call the fast and loose faculty members. They generally didn't follow directions, especially when it came to copyright and fair use. So as a result, their manuscripts would need fairly extensive review before they could even move on to the peer review stage because we needed to make sure that they really were using openly licensed images or they had included a citation. They had included a citation to the image. Then the final type of authors that I encountered a lot were the overcommitted faculty member. So these were amazing folks that are doing all the different things. They promised chapter drafts, but sometimes deadlines would come and go and you wouldn't hear from them. These authors are tough to deal with because in terms of your program's capacity, you're never really sure when you're going to get a draft from them. You're never really sure when they're going to respond. So it makes it a little bit harder for you to plan.
So in the interest of time, I'm going to stop there and turn it over to Apurva, but I'm happy to take any questions about any of this afterwards. Thanks.
Apurva: Thank you so much, Annie. And Anita, you can go into the next slide if you'd like or I can share slides. Happy to do either or. I just want to begin by acknowledging that I'm joining you all today from the traditional territories of many first nations including the Mississaugas of the First Credit, the Anishnabeg, the Chippewa, the Haudenosaunee and the Wendat peoples. I thank them for the privilege to live, work, and play here in this space that you might otherwise know as Toronto, Canada, and for allowing all of us to meet and learn together on this territory.
I also wanted to point out to all of you that this acknowledgement is only a first step in my own commitment to reconciliation, but I hope that for all of you, it can serve as a helpful starting point as you are delving in to learn more about the history of the lands in your region, and also to learn more about the history of your universities and where they're located. So feel free to use the resources on this slide to support your own work as you explore the history of indigenous communities in in your region and what you can do to help that going forward. Next slide, please.
I will note that acknowledgement is helpful because it offers a little bit of context about me and where I'm located. I also wanted to encourage you all to do the same as you think about working with authors and supporting OER creation at your universities. Start with purpose and ask yourself what do you want the OER created to do, what impact would you want it to have, and how can the authoring process that you're going to intentionally design around that support the work.
For instance, some of you might have broader goals in your publishing programs to create equitable OER to use the program as an opportunity, to support new and innovative teaching practices, to just build capacity, to do more of this work at your institution or just publish as much free content as possible in favor of student savings. So those initial goals that you have for your publishing program will determine how you work with the authors and how you guide them to create an OER that has that desired impact.
So think back to aligning the OER projects that you're selecting to work with for the year to that institutional strategic plan as well, and keep it in mind as you set your authors on track to create those materials. Next slide, please.
A lot of my suggestions will ring true to what the other speakers have said so far. I just wanted to emphasize one specific point about OER and context. Remember that OER is not created in vacuum, but rather, you're building it intentionally for specific student audience. I love this quote on the slide from Robin DeRosa as she says, "When you use OER, you change the relationships amongst you, your students, and your course materials." This highlights the power of OER to change those dynamics and relationships not just in the classroom, but also internally at the institution as some of you might be working in teams and across departments, or as Mandi and Barbara said, partnering with other institutions to do some of this work as well.
So encourage your authors to think about the student audience as they write. Ask them to think about scope, readability, example problems. Remind them to think beyond text. Can they include images or video or podcasts or interactive elements or other multimedia into the content to make it more engaging for students? Place relationships I would say before the materials because that content that's created alone doesn't drive student learning. Just assigning the textbook in the classroom doesn't guarantee success. So ask your authors to think holistically about the OER, the place that the OER has in the classroom alongside all of the other materials, and the relationships that as a teacher they might want to bring to the classrooms as well. Next slide, please.
I might just wrap up to say as tempting as it sounds to leave authoring work to subject matter experts, it's worth reiterating how much more beneficial and productive this work can be when it's done collaboratively. Consistent support, as Anita emphasized at the start of her presentation, makes drafting materials so much easier. It makes the process itself more equitable and the outcomes all the more valuable. So on this slide, there are some examples that indicate different ways in which people besides just subject matter experts or teaching faculty can be involved in the authoring process. So you can take a look and see how your role might fit into the authoring work and the authoring stage of a publishing program.
We at Rebus emphasize collaboration throughout the production process, but especially when writing as well because we know that there's a lot of pressure when it comes to drafting and writing completely new OER or remixing OER. So letting your authors know that as we're doing with this learning community that they have support along the way can alleviate a lot of anxiety for them around the deliverables, and instead make the process a little more enjoyable.
It also helps you to know that there are many hands on deck to support this work. Annie noted that time is hard to come by and you can't just put out anything. So lean on one another and distribute the onus of creation across a larger group, and in doing so, I think you will find that this helps your program become so much more sustainable in the longer term. It helps you build capacity at your institution as you tap into different departments for different stages of that writing process. It helps you learn from other experts along the way, and also helps make sure that you're not the only person carrying the burden of this creation work on your shoulders.
Working together I think also mirrors the wide ranging and large scale impact it can have for your students at your institution or around the world. Remember that whether you're thinking about just ideation of an OER or writing or publication or beyond to the use and adoption, open itself is a collective movement. So there's a large impact that your OER can have at any stage of that process, and it can be collaborative throughout.
I will lastly just note that these materials have been adapted from one of the sessions of our textbook success program, and on the next slide, I've just put some information about the program, as well as links to materials or ways to get in touch with myself or others at Rebus. I just want to say thank you to all of you for listening. I might hand it back to Anita to guide us through questions and discussion and conversation.
Anita: Great. Thank you so much, all of you. It's really interesting to hear the commonalities and the things that we offered, as well as the differences. So we'd love to see your questions in chat. I see that there are a few things there, but I'm going to start us off with asking each of the panelists, and you can go in whatever order you like, but, what do you wish that you had known before you took on this kind of work, and how did you learn that? So maybe just one thing that's been impactful for you in learning how to do this type of work.
Apurva: I have a very simple one, which is you're going to learn a lot as you go. So it's okay to not have all of the answers at the get-go, and the more projects you work with, the more you learn and each one is going to be different. So don't be afraid if you don't have all of the answers. Annie said, you can't just put out anything and there's this fear of the imperfect being out there, and I think you realize, and I wish I had known sooner that it's okay for imperfect every now and then because perfection is always iterative.
Anita: Yeah. How about the other panelists? Is there anything that you would add? I know you come from many different backgrounds and you've brought a lot to your current work. So just one thing that has been something you wish you had known.
Barbara: Well, for me, I think it's just working with authors and setting expectations. I guess trying to get on the same page with authors I just thought they would follow along with what we're trying to do, but it's really good to set expectations and really show them every step of the way what they have to expect and what we need from them, and that would've been so much more helpful if I've known that from the start.
Mandi: Yeah. I think I'm sure in Pub101 you've heard this a bazillion times right now, but it's just so much more work than you think it will be. Initially, I think both the authors and I were not both not aware of that. So it's helpful now for me to know about that, and like Barb was saying, set expectations about just how much work it is and how much the faculty member is really going to have to ... It's not going to magically happen. They're going to have to put in some serious effort to do it.
Annie: I agree with all the things mentioned. I would just add. I don't think I realized in the beginning how important being flexible was in these projects. When we started, I would have very strict timelines for every project and then get increasingly dismayed as those timelines were broken. I think I had to learn to accept that these projects, at least for us, because we didn't put a time requirement on them, were multi-year projects and faculty had remember doing this work on top of teaching, on top of care taking, on top of surviving a global pandemic. We have so many responsibilities. The faculty, too, have so many responsibilities, and this is just one thing of many that they're doing. So just recognizing that and being flexible.
Anita: I think those are all really great points. I would add to that. My initial thought was, "Oh, people are giving out grants and they're just saying, 'Okay. Go and do this.'" The reason why I emphasized so much in my presentation that the relationship is so important is because that has driven every project. We've encountered lots of problems, but having regular meetings with people, talking through issues, just trying to be really clear with them about what's expected and trying to be very much a listener with regard to the struggles that they're having in the work or the things that are going well has, I think, made a big difference.
Someone said to me once, "You don't just give somebody a bunch of money, send them to a dark room, and expect them eight months later to come out with a book. It just doesn't work that way, and that made a whole lot of sense to me. Yes, Apurva, being kind and flexible is so important both to yourself and others as this is all relationship-based work. Thank you for that.
So I want to go back to what Annie said about three different kind of authors. I noticed that resonated also in the chat, the experts, the fast and loose authors, and the overcommitted authors. I'd like to ask, what kinds of things have you learned about, and I'm sure some of you have those kinds of authors, what kinds of things have you learned about how to inform a those different kinds of authors about what this work takes? That's for any of you.
Mandi: I don't know. I don't know if this totally answers the question, but something that I realized about myself, maybe it's a personality thing or maybe it's a librarian thing, but I just have a lot of trouble telling faculty what to do, like telling them, "Here's the deadline for this. I think, initially, my approach was more, "So do you want to do this?" But I think Annie's breakdown of the different authors, for some authors, you do need to give them some structure or the project won't really go anywhere, but with others, you don't need to, really. They will take the lead and do that themselves. So I really like that breakdown as a way to guide how you would approach an author you're working with.
Apurva: I might just say, I've definitely seen that assumption around, you don't always want to tell somebody what to be doing, but also, I would think back to the slides I had around purpose. It is an OER being created as part of a publishing program that you're intentionally designing. It's part of maybe an institutional strategic plan. So sometimes there is really a need to lay those expectations out very clearly, even with authors who are that overachieving category, as Annie was describing. I have seen on many Rebus projects that a memorandum of understanding can be a good way to lay out those expectations very clearly, but pairing not just a legal document or agreement of sorts, but pairing that with a face-to-face conversation where you break down and explain everything from what are the deliverables, what is the timeline, what is maybe the frequency of meeting, what is the support available, just having a conversation. Again, thinking about this as a relationship-based work, where you're meeting with a human, an individual who is doing this work and not just some automaton that is going to hack away at the computer and produce a draft in a week's time.
Anita: Yeah. So we have a question in the chat, "Is there a point when it's clear that the project is not going to be successful and you all agree to call an end to it?" Great question. Really hard question, but really great question. I can jump in. I can tell you about a project that should have been stopped about three times, and I think we probably should have stopped working on this project, but it was my first project and I didn't want it to die and I didn't know what I was doing. So we kept on. The professor and I still talk to each other. We're still friendly with each other, but there were tears at various points.
So I think maybe before you get to that project that you flag, "I see this happening. I see that we're not meeting our deadlines," and that you flag some of those things as they come up. "I see that it looks like you need more time," or "We're not making progress here. Do you want to talk about that? Do you want to move forward? Do you want to take a break? What works for you?" and really put the ball in the court of the author.
I've not had a situation where I have told an author, "I'm sorry, we're not going to do this anymore." It's usually them dropping out, but that doesn't mean that's not appropriate. It just means it's not been clear to me when that has happened. So how about others? Have you had situations where either yours or someone else's where you agree, "This isn't happening," or "This is not happening in the foreseeable future"?
Annie: I will say I think I've had a similar technique to you, Anita, in that for authors that haven't been particularly responsive or seem to be missing deadlines, when I've had a conversation with them, I've really tried to say, "Listen, I understand you're really busy. I understand you have so much going on. So how can I support you with this project? Do you want to pare it down?" We have this conversation where we've given them some money, so we want to get something from our money.
So if they're writing a textbook, maybe doing a whole introductory physics textbook is just too much, but they've made some progress. Could we take some of that and turn that into something else? Maybe it's not a complete textbook, but maybe it's something else that could still be an OER that's really useful to people.
Another technique I've used is faculty who originally start out thinking that they're going to write a completely original textbook all themselves and then it gets to be a lot of work. So I suggest, "Would you consider adapting materials? Can I show you some of these other open textbooks in criminal justice that have been written? Could you take some of those pieces and then add in the local context for your students to make it easier for them?"
So that's been my approach, but similarly, I've never said to an author, "We're not doing this anymore." I've even had authors leave the institution and move to another institution and we still said we would keep working with them from their new institution.
Apurva: What I'm picking up in your story, Annie and Anita, and perhaps maybe what was missing from Amanda's story in the chat is open communication. I think that's very, very important in these types of relationships because as Annie was saying, it could be a variety of reasons that a project isn't working out. So the first step in those cases would be to understand what is happening. Is it a lack of time? Is it a lack of resources? Is there something happening in that author's maybe personal or professional life that is causing a drain and preventing them from succeeding in this project as they should or not delivering the drafts as expected on time or as agreed upon. It's important to remember that you might need to operate from more of an emotional support capacity first to understand what the root of the problem is before making that decision.
If you do, you don't need to feel bad for doing so. As Annie said, you could think about, "Well, what can I salvage from the months of work that have gone by?" or as Anita and Amanda are suggesting, maybe inform the author and say, "We're not asking this all together. We're putting this on pause. We encourage you to apply again next year and we'll see how it goes. Hopefully, you're in a better position to be able to move forward or hopefully, we have the resources, the technology that you need to do this more successfully." So stopping a project now doesn't mean you can't pick it up in the future. So feel empowered to say no if your gut and if all of the signs and signals and information you have are leading you in that direction.
Mandi: I would just add that, one thing that ... So when we've started our grant program, obviously, we wanted to create open textbooks and actually build things, but the top priority I think then was just to grow awareness of open education in general. So we definitely had some less than stellar grant projects, but we moved forward with them anyway. Yeah, we had some people who it was just that they, like Amanda is saying in the chat, they just went missing and we couldn't reach them. We couldn't get to them at all, but I think, so one aspect of our grant program is the faculty member isn't just creating something. They also have to do some small advocacy thing. So they have to be a little testimonial at one of my open textbook workshops or they have to create a little video or something.
In a way, that is allowing us to at least get something for the grant money that we're giving them even if, hopefully, there's a final product, but even if there isn't, we still worked with someone and raised awareness and gotten some advocacy out of it as well.
Anita: I'm connecting what you just said, Mandi, with what Apurva said earlier about your goals for creating OER and will drive how you interact with people and what that work looks like, what your relationship with those authors look like. So it sounds like you're still able to reach some of your goals even though the materials weren't quite what you thought they should be.
So seeing some conversation in the chat about one person who ... So this is Amanda saying, "In the grant program I used to run, I only had to end a grant because the person went completely missing in action. We reached out multiple times, got silence or excuses, and after they missed a milestone project check in and sent a we're not going to do this anymore email with information about why, and that they would be allowed to reapply in the next cycle with no guarantee that they'd be able to get in. They weren't paid anything yet at that point."
Then Phoebe has a really great thought, too, "We've had a couple of instances where authors stepped away from the project. One was a bad fit. One was life circumstances. We ended up asking them what percentage of the project they thought they did in order to determine what portion of the stipend they should receive." Those are really great ways to both honor the time that someone has put into something and to try to also preserve that relationship.
So I'd love to see if there are others on this call who have encountered these situations where a project is not progressing as it should and needs to either be put in pause or how did you handle that. So please add this in the chat if you have stories that you want to tell.
Let's see. I'm going to talk a little bit about tools. We've talked a lot about relationships, but I breezed very quickly through the managing the project management tools. I'm wondering, Mandi, you alluded to this. You said you used teams to organize your projects. Besides the specific software, what kinds of tasks do you try to track, and what do you think are most important to keep an eye on in terms of things that you feel like need to be managed in this process? Obviously, money, but other kinds of things. How do you keep things going? That's for Mandi, as well as the other panelists.
Mandi: Well, I mean, so I will say recently we started offering peer review as part of our publishing process, and that really helped us up the organization of everything because we had to be very careful about what's finished and what has gone out to a peer reviewer and has it gotten back and do we have a final version. So that was a lot of managing the pieces and parts. Yeah, I mean, mostly it's about deliverables, about what have they turned in, and when we're working with Pressbooks, we can keep an eye on that pretty easily. I don't know, Barb, if you have anything else.
Barbara: No. Just staying connected really helps with the author. It helps so they don't go missing in action, as you say, but that doesn't always help. It's just trying to stay connected is helpful.
Apurva: I'll maybe drop in a link to a chapter that I co-authored with Stephanie Buck in Oregon that talks about project management tools, especially those file management tools, in particular, can be very helpful if an author leaves the institution and somebody else steps in. So you have a lot of documentation that either handover to the next person. I find being organized and staying on track in those ways can be super helpful not just if someone steps into the project midway as an author, but also to help you juggle multiple projects because, for the author, it's just the one they're working on, but you might be overseeing four or five different grants or more, maybe 20 over that year.
I will just note in terms of technology, we always try to assign one technology point of support. So regardless of whether the tool is Manifold or Pressbooks or H5P or PubPub or Overleaf, as long as the author knows, "Who is the person I can contact when I'm confused about the features of this particular tool? Where do I go? What do I do?" As long as they know who it is they can lean on, they can communicate and go from there.
Annie: Apurva, your point assumes that there are multiple folks who are working to support these publications, which is not always the case, but yeah, it's well taken. I think you're right. Yeah. I mean, what was challenging for us is that we had not just our team in the library publishing side working on these projects, but we also had support from some press staff that used an entirely different workflow for projects than we were using. We also sometimes would bring in our library graphic designer who mostly worked on promotional pieces and communication stuff for the library. So she also had a different project management tool that she used with her communications team. So getting everyone on the same page and working together was really, really tricky. We generally use Google Sheets, which I don't think is necessarily the best, but at least everyone knows how to use it.
Anita: As you have all been talking, I've been frantically looking for a publication that just came out, the OER Starter Kit for Program Managers.
Annie: I just dropped in a link to that, Anita.
Anita: Okay. I have missed that, but this is a guide that Apurva and several others in the open education community worked on for the last, I don't know, two or three years. This is a pandemic project, apparently, but take a look at this. I have not yet read it, but I think it would be very interesting for a lot of folks. I'd also say that Rebus guide for creating open textbooks so far is helpful, as well as the OEN curriculum and the different guides that you already have access to.
So we have one more question in the chat and question is, "Mandi, what tasks did you give to the intern?" So you had an intern. What did the intern do and how did that go? So it sounds like interns might be a possibility for this person.
Mandi: Yes. Hi, Rumyana. It's nice to see you here. So we gave him a lot of leeway to choose what he wanted to do because this was unpaid, so it was really very much what would help you. The main project that he did was we wanted to do more marketing of what we had already published because we had done very little. So we organized a panel of authors during Open Education week and we had four of our authors that Jameson, our intern, did the asking of the questions of our panel and they talked about their experience and we invited people from around the state to attend on our own campus, and it was really great. I think even though it was a nerve-wracking experience for him, he really enjoyed it.
Then we also have him doing things like looking for ... We have a faculty member who's publishing something in Pressbooks. She wanted to use images from her PowerPoint slides, but we weren't sure if they were all openly licensed or in the public domain or what the situation was. So he was going through and reviewing and finding, when possible, openly licensed options for those. Then I think he was doing some other things in Pressbooks. Barb, do you...
Barbara: Yeah. I did training for him in Pressbooks and I think he was going to upload the images into Pressbooks as well working with the media part of it. I dropped in that video if you want to see with the intern, into chat, if you're all interested.
Mandi: Yeah. We just recently recorded a lightning talk about our experience for Open Cleveland. So you can watch about that.
Anita: That's great. So we are very fast running out of time. I just want to say thank you so much for all of you who joined us today. Thank you, Mandi, Barbara, Annie, and Apurva. Thank you to the organizers of this event, some of whom I will probably not be able to name, so Karen, Amanda, Carla, and I apologize if there are others that I missed, but we are grateful that you have joined us as we continue to learn about open textbook publishing. We are still learning as you might notice, and we hope to continue to share available resources and recommendations.
One of the key takeaways is that you're not alone in figuring out how to support open textbook authors and that the learning continues. So if you have more questions about today's session or you'd like to chat with others about it, please use the class notes. We will review the notes before the following session to answer any outstanding questions, and we look forward to seeing you all next week. So thank you so much for joining us today.
END OF VIDEO
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Pub101 is a free, informal, online orientation to open textbook publishing. This May 18, 2022, session is hosted by Anita Walz of Virginia Tech. Anita welcomes insightful guests from Cleveland State University, the University of Delaware, and The Rebus Foundation to discuss key considerations for building productive working relationships with authors.
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:
- Anita Walz (Assistant Director for Open Education and Scholarly Communication Librarian, Virginia Tech)
- Annie Johnson (Associate University Librarian for Publishing, Preservation, Research, and Digital Access, University of Delaware Library and Press)
- Apurva Ashok (Assistant Director and Director of Open Education, The Rebus Foundation)
- Barbara Loomis (Digital Scholarly Publications and Programs Administrator, Cleveland State University)
- Mandi Goodsett (Performing Arts & Humanities Librarian and Open Educational Resources & Copyright Advisor, Cleveland State University)
Anita: Good afternoon, good morning, good evening. It's nice to be here with all of you today. I'm joining you from Blacksburg, Virginia. We're about four hours south of Washington, DC in the mountains of Southwestern Virginia, and I am thankful that it is a gorgeous day and that we are able to, even though it rained recently, have an in-person outdoor graduation this year.
So please take a moment in the chat to say hi, tell us where you're coming from, and maybe something that you are thankful for. There's a lot going on in our world that is hard, but there's still a lot of things for which to be thankful. So say hi and tell us where you're, and if you want something that you're grateful for, and we'll get started in just a minute.
So I see people from Cleveland, Kalamazoo, Storm Lake, Iowa, Northeastern Ohio, welcome, Atlanta. A really hot day in Natchitoches, Louisiana, and I apologize, I'm saying that incorrectly. Hammond, Naples, welcome. Nice to see all of you here today, and from Philly, and Detroit, and Florida, and I think I missed one, Carbondale, Fargo. Great. Nice to see all of you here. Yes. Good morning. "Aloha," from O‘ahu. Very nice to see you today.
So I'm going to just get started. We have a packed agenda today. So hello and welcome to the Open Education Network's Pub101 and the session on Communication Tools and Strategies for Project Management. Thank you for joining today's session. My name is Anita Walz, and I'm the Assistant Director of Open Education and Scholarly Communication Librarian at the University Libraries at Virginia Tech. I'm happy to be your host and facilitator today.
So after my presentation, I will be handing this off to Mandi Goodsett, who is the Performing Arts and Humanities Librarian and Open Educational Resources and Copyright Advisor, and her colleague, Barb Loomis, who is the Digital Scholarly Publications and Program Administrator, both at Cleveland State University. Yay to you in Ohio. Annie Johnson will be our speaker after that. She's the Associate University Librarian for Publishing Preservation Research and Digital Access at the University of Delaware Library and Press, and Apurva Ashok, who is the Assistant Director and Director of Open Education at The Rebus Foundation.
Each of these people will provide an array of perspectives on working with authors and open publishing, how they've supported authors who are writing open textbooks, including lessons learned and recommendations. As always, we will leave time for your questions and conversation. There may be many of you who have a lot of experience with this topic in addition to our guests, so we invite you to share your experiences and resources. While we will hold questions until the end, please feel free to add them to the chat at any point.
The webinar is being recorded and will be added to our YouTube Pub101 Spring 2022 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.
I'm going talk a bit about working with authors to get us started off. People are important to me, and working with authors is all about respect, transparency, and communication, tools for getting organized, as well as managing expectations. In short, it's about building a productive working relationship to get to an end result. You're not managing authors as much as you're taking the lead and proactively managing your relationship with authors by establishing shared goals and moving a project forward toward the finish line.
So you heard last week from Carla Myers, and I want to reiterate the importance of having agreeing upon and documenting a shared understanding of goals and some non-negotiables, that those two things are really important to any productive working relationship. I've found it's helpful to have this discussion about non-negotiables both yours and your authors before you plunge into a new project. An author may have very strong preferences regarding technology or authoring platforms you may have or your program may have certain requirements for support. So these are really important to talk about. One resource that may have been discussed last week is the OEN's author intake document.
Finally, getting into the author relationship part of things, I want to emphasize that how you work is really important. I always tell authors that what is most important to me is to keep the lines of communication open. Life happens, the good and the bad. People have things come up in their personal and professional lives. They change jobs, their collaborator leaves, they're expecting a baby. I once had a collaborator who was not very communicative. He finally told me, "Oh, I decided to change the project because my collaborator took a job at another institution." I said, "I'm so sorry to hear your collaborator left. How long ago did this happen?" "Oh, four months ago."
So I may have been really limited in my ability to make a difference in his situation, but I didn't know. Since I didn't know, there was nothing that I could have done to assist him in resolving this issue.
So another significant area of working with authors is in assessing feasibility, developing a project plan that's reasonable, and identifying what might be a stretch too far. So I think if you were a librarian like me, you may have a tendency to over serve. I do anyway. I want things to happen so I overextend myself. However, stepping back into a maybe hard and maybe detailed conversation with your author is one way to really consciously assess the feasibility of a project.
Look at your expectations for finishing. What labor or what money is expected? What feels like too much or too fast that could be delegated? Another way of looking at this is looking at the iron triangle of project management, which says that we're constrained by three things, our schedule, our scope, and resources. It said that you can have two of these really good in any project fast, good, and cheap. So naturally, we want all three. So it's helpful to ask ourselves whether we're being reasonable, and if we're not being reasonable, do we need to add more time? Do we need to limit our scope? Do we need to add more money or do we need to change the speed of our expectations?
Finally, as Carla said earlier last week, I put it in writing, have an MOU and maybe have an MOU at some other parties. Why do you need this? Because it's heartbreaking when someone you've worked with so intensively to develop their project signs a publisher agreement without your knowledge. It's happened to me, and it's very difficult.
So feasibility is an ongoing task throughout the project. When you or your author discover all kinds of really cool things that you could add to your scope and are tempted to add them, I want to warn you that boundaries are really good, and it's okay to say no. It's okay to say, "Let's hold that for phase two." It's also okay to say, " Not yet." So boundaries are good, and scope creep is a real thing to both warn yourself and your authors about.
I'd like to talk very briefly about some of the project tools that you may need. I'm going to abbreviate this, but some of the tools you may need are style guides. These can help you to treat similar content in a consistent manner. Other tools for working together are communication plans, finding the best mode of communication, project organization tools. Many of these I commonly build. You might build them yourself. You'll definitely want to maintain some notes about your project, project schedule, a checklist. You can put everything that you need in your own checklist, and you don't have to share it with your authors.
On the relationship side, I'm going to say sometimes authors will resist your efforts to organize the process, and this is because they have their own way of organizing things. So if it works and it doesn't always, but let them organize the parts of the project that they need to organize, but make sure you have access to their systems and their particular documents.
These tools are used between meetings and in meetings, and I know that past speakers have talked a bit about meetings. I want to say one thing is to prioritize your author needs. It's great for you to go into a meeting, have your list of things that you want to talk about, but I always say to people because I don't know their context, "What is helpful for you to talk about today? I have my list of things that I want to talk about, but what do you want to talk about?" because I don't know their particular context.
Finally, sometimes and rather often, things go wrong. It's pretty normal for things to go wrong, for things to pop up that you did not expect. This is normal, and it's actually okay. It happens for lots of different reasons. These are complex projects, but open textbook publishing is really complicated. There are so many pieces that come into it. So it's better to expect and work through these problems than to proceed by working harder without resolving them. It does take time and that's okay, but you're worth it to build, and this work is worth it to build healthier and more sustainable ways of working.
So I look forward to seeing how you build, and I'm happy to field questions in the chat if you want to put some in there. The slides are available to you. I will add the link into the chat. So I'm going to hand this off to Mandi Goodsett and Barb Loomis from Cleveland State University.
Mandi: Thanks, Anita. Thank you. Here we go. All right. Hi, everyone. We are going to be talking about Cleveland State University's experience working with authors. Again, my name is Mandi Goodsett.
Barbara: I'm Barb Loomis.
Mandi: We're going to just give you a very, very brief background about our program. Our Textbook Affordability Grant Program was started in 2016 by our previous Library Director, Glenda Thornton, and we have been offering small grants every spring and fall since then. Most of our projects, honestly, are not from scratch. Original authoring projects, a lot of them are adaptation, projects using existing materials. We have some resources. We have Pressbooks, which is great. We have Barb and myself to work on this in addition to our full-time jobs, and we have a little bit of grant funding.
So basically, what we can share with you is how we try to support faculty authors with modest budget and staffing. So if you're an institution that doesn't have a lot of resources or you're just getting started and it feels overwhelming to have a publishing program, our model might be helpful for you.
So next slide. So just a little bit about our grant process. We start with having faculty fill out an intent to submit form before they even apply to do any kind of authoring project. I got this idea from my colleague, Jessica Kirschner at VCU, and I have found it very, very helpful for us to gauge the viability of a project and have an opportunity to meet with a faculty member and talk through what they want to do before they even apply.
Then we have an initial team meeting with the faculty member, and that includes the subject librarian, one instructional designer, myself as the OER person, and Barb as our Pressbooks coordinator. We leave it up to the faculty member how frequently they want to meet, which really puts them in the driver's seat and helps them take control of the process a little bit, take ownership of it a little bit. Usually, we meet monthly. Sometimes it's less frequently, sometimes it's more frequently. We use Microsoft Teams for project management. So we just create a folder for each faculty member, and I have a document in there for ongoing notes. So every time we meet, I add notes to that document. I also use calendar reminders to check in, and we usually communicate via email or via Zoom.
Barbara: So our digital repository is titled EngagedScholarship @ CSU, and it's where we highlight the scholarly and artistic work of our faculty and students. Here, we also publish open access books and OERs under MSL academic endeavors, the imprint of Michael Schwartz Library. In general, we provide details of our publishing program and our research guide, and I'm available to walk authors through what to expect. We don't provide editing or proofreading as we don't have those resources.
Before we begin the publishing process, the author signs a publishing agreement and is asked what creative comments license they want to assign the book. We take the manuscript and format it in Pressbooks or train the author and allow them to input their work on their own timeline. When it's completely formatted, we assign it an ISBN number, catalog it, link it to Pressbooks, and publish it in our digital repository. Once the book is published, we provide marketing for the book.
After the initial team meeting Mandi mentioned, I schedule a Pressbooks training session with the faculty member, and if they plan to create an ebook. I also set up the shell of the book and add the chapter titles and as many book details as I can. The training usually lasts under an hour, depending on the author, and faculty have either taken to using Pressbooks on their own or they provide me with the Word document and I transfer the book into Pressbooks. I'll provide support all the way through publishing and marketing of the book.
Some alternative formats authors have used are Adobe InDesign for books and Overleaf for math. One faculty member simply used a Word document and converted it to a PDF to create a phonetics workbook for her students. This is a sample of her OER in EngagedScholarship, and she is thrilled that she has received more than 3,000 downloads since it was published in our digital repository in August 2020.
Mandi: So in interest of time, we're really just going to give you, very briefly, some lessons learned. As I said, we don't have a lot of resources so we've learned to do more with less when it comes to supporting faculty. As Anita said, having boundaries is really important. One thing that's been successful for us is partnering with other institutions to provide better support, and we've been really, really fortunate to do one project with Virginia Tech and with Anita. So our faculty and our institutions could provide help for each other and that was a really positive experience.
Obviously, the open community is very sharing and giving, and so there are lots of ideas and documents that others have created that we can then use to help coordinate with faculty. Finally, we worked with an intern this past semester. This was something new that we tried. This was a student really interested in publishing who just really wanted experience. So that was really awesome to have another person to help us out while also giving them the experience that they need. If you have other questions after the Q&A, we would love to talk with you more about our various projects and other details, but for now, we will turn it over to Annie Johnson from University of Delaware.
Annie: Hi, everyone. I don't have slides, so I'm just going to chat with you a little casually, but as Anita said, I am the AUL for Publishing at the University of Delaware Library Museums and Press. I'm actually brand new at UD. I've been in my current role for about a month now. So I'm going to be talking to you about my experience working with authors at my previous institution, which is Temple University in Philadelphia, At Temple, I was the editor-in-chief of North Broad Press, which was a joint library press imprint that primarily publishes open textbooks.
In terms of the structure of the program, we would put out a call for proposals for faculty-authored open textbooks once a year in the spring. Faculty that were selected to publish with us would receive a $5,000 stipend, and that's 2,500 up front and the remainder after they turned in a draft of the manuscript, and that is very important if you're not already doing that, to not give all the entire stipend upfront.
Overall, I would say we provided a lot of support to authors. We helped faculty find openly licensed images. In some cases, we worked to get permission for an image if it was under copyright. We attempted to get faculty to do some of the heavy lifting when it came to accessibility, but ultimately, we frequently ended up doing much of that work, and so by that, I mean, creating alt texts for images.
Other things we did, we managed peer review, copy editing, and type setting. We worked with a third-party vendor to create e-pubs for all of our books, and then we uploaded the book and any supporting materials to our publishing platform manifold. We also arranged for POD copies, which could be purchased at cost.
I would say that we started our program with a plan for how much support we were going to offer authors, but once the manuscript started coming in, we really ended up expanding our support, and that was in large part I'd say because we wanted to put out quality publications. I think maybe I was particularly sensitive to this because of our connection to our university press. So I felt like we couldn't just put out anything. We really had to make sure that these books were good.
I would say for one book, in particular, I ended up doing quite extensive developmental editing, and the time that I invent invested in that book would not have been sustainable if I had to do it for every book. That is the thing that's the rub here is that every book is different, every author is different, which can really make it hard when you're trying to figure out when you're starting a program, how much time are you going to spend on each project.
For folks who are writing drafts, I would generally check in with them once a semester. Once we were in the production stage, Zooms and emails would get a lot more frequent, but it really, really depended on the person. So that's why I wanted to just end by saying that I wanted to share three types of authors that I encountered most frequently in my work. The first and hopefully this will be helpful to you all, but the first author was what you might call the overachiever. These were folks who would write their manuscripts on time. They would need very little help or support from our team. They could be counted on to follow directions. That's a big one. I would say that, generally, these were faculty who had published books before, so they did have experience. They understood how to put a book together from start to finish.
The second type of authors that I encountered a lot were what I would like to call the fast and loose faculty members. They generally didn't follow directions, especially when it came to copyright and fair use. So as a result, their manuscripts would need fairly extensive review before they could even move on to the peer review stage because we needed to make sure that they really were using openly licensed images or they had included a citation. They had included a citation to the image. Then the final type of authors that I encountered a lot were the overcommitted faculty member. So these were amazing folks that are doing all the different things. They promised chapter drafts, but sometimes deadlines would come and go and you wouldn't hear from them. These authors are tough to deal with because in terms of your program's capacity, you're never really sure when you're going to get a draft from them. You're never really sure when they're going to respond. So it makes it a little bit harder for you to plan.
So in the interest of time, I'm going to stop there and turn it over to Apurva, but I'm happy to take any questions about any of this afterwards. Thanks.
Apurva: Thank you so much, Annie. And Anita, you can go into the next slide if you'd like or I can share slides. Happy to do either or. I just want to begin by acknowledging that I'm joining you all today from the traditional territories of many first nations including the Mississaugas of the First Credit, the Anishnabeg, the Chippewa, the Haudenosaunee and the Wendat peoples. I thank them for the privilege to live, work, and play here in this space that you might otherwise know as Toronto, Canada, and for allowing all of us to meet and learn together on this territory.
I also wanted to point out to all of you that this acknowledgement is only a first step in my own commitment to reconciliation, but I hope that for all of you, it can serve as a helpful starting point as you are delving in to learn more about the history of the lands in your region, and also to learn more about the history of your universities and where they're located. So feel free to use the resources on this slide to support your own work as you explore the history of indigenous communities in in your region and what you can do to help that going forward. Next slide, please.
I will note that acknowledgement is helpful because it offers a little bit of context about me and where I'm located. I also wanted to encourage you all to do the same as you think about working with authors and supporting OER creation at your universities. Start with purpose and ask yourself what do you want the OER created to do, what impact would you want it to have, and how can the authoring process that you're going to intentionally design around that support the work.
For instance, some of you might have broader goals in your publishing programs to create equitable OER to use the program as an opportunity, to support new and innovative teaching practices, to just build capacity, to do more of this work at your institution or just publish as much free content as possible in favor of student savings. So those initial goals that you have for your publishing program will determine how you work with the authors and how you guide them to create an OER that has that desired impact.
So think back to aligning the OER projects that you're selecting to work with for the year to that institutional strategic plan as well, and keep it in mind as you set your authors on track to create those materials. Next slide, please.
A lot of my suggestions will ring true to what the other speakers have said so far. I just wanted to emphasize one specific point about OER and context. Remember that OER is not created in vacuum, but rather, you're building it intentionally for specific student audience. I love this quote on the slide from Robin DeRosa as she says, "When you use OER, you change the relationships amongst you, your students, and your course materials." This highlights the power of OER to change those dynamics and relationships not just in the classroom, but also internally at the institution as some of you might be working in teams and across departments, or as Mandi and Barbara said, partnering with other institutions to do some of this work as well.
So encourage your authors to think about the student audience as they write. Ask them to think about scope, readability, example problems. Remind them to think beyond text. Can they include images or video or podcasts or interactive elements or other multimedia into the content to make it more engaging for students? Place relationships I would say before the materials because that content that's created alone doesn't drive student learning. Just assigning the textbook in the classroom doesn't guarantee success. So ask your authors to think holistically about the OER, the place that the OER has in the classroom alongside all of the other materials, and the relationships that as a teacher they might want to bring to the classrooms as well. Next slide, please.
I might just wrap up to say as tempting as it sounds to leave authoring work to subject matter experts, it's worth reiterating how much more beneficial and productive this work can be when it's done collaboratively. Consistent support, as Anita emphasized at the start of her presentation, makes drafting materials so much easier. It makes the process itself more equitable and the outcomes all the more valuable. So on this slide, there are some examples that indicate different ways in which people besides just subject matter experts or teaching faculty can be involved in the authoring process. So you can take a look and see how your role might fit into the authoring work and the authoring stage of a publishing program.
We at Rebus emphasize collaboration throughout the production process, but especially when writing as well because we know that there's a lot of pressure when it comes to drafting and writing completely new OER or remixing OER. So letting your authors know that as we're doing with this learning community that they have support along the way can alleviate a lot of anxiety for them around the deliverables, and instead make the process a little more enjoyable.
It also helps you to know that there are many hands on deck to support this work. Annie noted that time is hard to come by and you can't just put out anything. So lean on one another and distribute the onus of creation across a larger group, and in doing so, I think you will find that this helps your program become so much more sustainable in the longer term. It helps you build capacity at your institution as you tap into different departments for different stages of that writing process. It helps you learn from other experts along the way, and also helps make sure that you're not the only person carrying the burden of this creation work on your shoulders.
Working together I think also mirrors the wide ranging and large scale impact it can have for your students at your institution or around the world. Remember that whether you're thinking about just ideation of an OER or writing or publication or beyond to the use and adoption, open itself is a collective movement. So there's a large impact that your OER can have at any stage of that process, and it can be collaborative throughout.
I will lastly just note that these materials have been adapted from one of the sessions of our textbook success program, and on the next slide, I've just put some information about the program, as well as links to materials or ways to get in touch with myself or others at Rebus. I just want to say thank you to all of you for listening. I might hand it back to Anita to guide us through questions and discussion and conversation.
Anita: Great. Thank you so much, all of you. It's really interesting to hear the commonalities and the things that we offered, as well as the differences. So we'd love to see your questions in chat. I see that there are a few things there, but I'm going to start us off with asking each of the panelists, and you can go in whatever order you like, but, what do you wish that you had known before you took on this kind of work, and how did you learn that? So maybe just one thing that's been impactful for you in learning how to do this type of work.
Apurva: I have a very simple one, which is you're going to learn a lot as you go. So it's okay to not have all of the answers at the get-go, and the more projects you work with, the more you learn and each one is going to be different. So don't be afraid if you don't have all of the answers. Annie said, you can't just put out anything and there's this fear of the imperfect being out there, and I think you realize, and I wish I had known sooner that it's okay for imperfect every now and then because perfection is always iterative.
Anita: Yeah. How about the other panelists? Is there anything that you would add? I know you come from many different backgrounds and you've brought a lot to your current work. So just one thing that has been something you wish you had known.
Barbara: Well, for me, I think it's just working with authors and setting expectations. I guess trying to get on the same page with authors I just thought they would follow along with what we're trying to do, but it's really good to set expectations and really show them every step of the way what they have to expect and what we need from them, and that would've been so much more helpful if I've known that from the start.
Mandi: Yeah. I think I'm sure in Pub101 you've heard this a bazillion times right now, but it's just so much more work than you think it will be. Initially, I think both the authors and I were not both not aware of that. So it's helpful now for me to know about that, and like Barb was saying, set expectations about just how much work it is and how much the faculty member is really going to have to ... It's not going to magically happen. They're going to have to put in some serious effort to do it.
Annie: I agree with all the things mentioned. I would just add. I don't think I realized in the beginning how important being flexible was in these projects. When we started, I would have very strict timelines for every project and then get increasingly dismayed as those timelines were broken. I think I had to learn to accept that these projects, at least for us, because we didn't put a time requirement on them, were multi-year projects and faculty had remember doing this work on top of teaching, on top of care taking, on top of surviving a global pandemic. We have so many responsibilities. The faculty, too, have so many responsibilities, and this is just one thing of many that they're doing. So just recognizing that and being flexible.
Anita: I think those are all really great points. I would add to that. My initial thought was, "Oh, people are giving out grants and they're just saying, 'Okay. Go and do this.'" The reason why I emphasized so much in my presentation that the relationship is so important is because that has driven every project. We've encountered lots of problems, but having regular meetings with people, talking through issues, just trying to be really clear with them about what's expected and trying to be very much a listener with regard to the struggles that they're having in the work or the things that are going well has, I think, made a big difference.
Someone said to me once, "You don't just give somebody a bunch of money, send them to a dark room, and expect them eight months later to come out with a book. It just doesn't work that way, and that made a whole lot of sense to me. Yes, Apurva, being kind and flexible is so important both to yourself and others as this is all relationship-based work. Thank you for that.
So I want to go back to what Annie said about three different kind of authors. I noticed that resonated also in the chat, the experts, the fast and loose authors, and the overcommitted authors. I'd like to ask, what kinds of things have you learned about, and I'm sure some of you have those kinds of authors, what kinds of things have you learned about how to inform a those different kinds of authors about what this work takes? That's for any of you.
Mandi: I don't know. I don't know if this totally answers the question, but something that I realized about myself, maybe it's a personality thing or maybe it's a librarian thing, but I just have a lot of trouble telling faculty what to do, like telling them, "Here's the deadline for this. I think, initially, my approach was more, "So do you want to do this?" But I think Annie's breakdown of the different authors, for some authors, you do need to give them some structure or the project won't really go anywhere, but with others, you don't need to, really. They will take the lead and do that themselves. So I really like that breakdown as a way to guide how you would approach an author you're working with.
Apurva: I might just say, I've definitely seen that assumption around, you don't always want to tell somebody what to be doing, but also, I would think back to the slides I had around purpose. It is an OER being created as part of a publishing program that you're intentionally designing. It's part of maybe an institutional strategic plan. So sometimes there is really a need to lay those expectations out very clearly, even with authors who are that overachieving category, as Annie was describing. I have seen on many Rebus projects that a memorandum of understanding can be a good way to lay out those expectations very clearly, but pairing not just a legal document or agreement of sorts, but pairing that with a face-to-face conversation where you break down and explain everything from what are the deliverables, what is the timeline, what is maybe the frequency of meeting, what is the support available, just having a conversation. Again, thinking about this as a relationship-based work, where you're meeting with a human, an individual who is doing this work and not just some automaton that is going to hack away at the computer and produce a draft in a week's time.
Anita: Yeah. So we have a question in the chat, "Is there a point when it's clear that the project is not going to be successful and you all agree to call an end to it?" Great question. Really hard question, but really great question. I can jump in. I can tell you about a project that should have been stopped about three times, and I think we probably should have stopped working on this project, but it was my first project and I didn't want it to die and I didn't know what I was doing. So we kept on. The professor and I still talk to each other. We're still friendly with each other, but there were tears at various points.
So I think maybe before you get to that project that you flag, "I see this happening. I see that we're not meeting our deadlines," and that you flag some of those things as they come up. "I see that it looks like you need more time," or "We're not making progress here. Do you want to talk about that? Do you want to move forward? Do you want to take a break? What works for you?" and really put the ball in the court of the author.
I've not had a situation where I have told an author, "I'm sorry, we're not going to do this anymore." It's usually them dropping out, but that doesn't mean that's not appropriate. It just means it's not been clear to me when that has happened. So how about others? Have you had situations where either yours or someone else's where you agree, "This isn't happening," or "This is not happening in the foreseeable future"?
Annie: I will say I think I've had a similar technique to you, Anita, in that for authors that haven't been particularly responsive or seem to be missing deadlines, when I've had a conversation with them, I've really tried to say, "Listen, I understand you're really busy. I understand you have so much going on. So how can I support you with this project? Do you want to pare it down?" We have this conversation where we've given them some money, so we want to get something from our money.
So if they're writing a textbook, maybe doing a whole introductory physics textbook is just too much, but they've made some progress. Could we take some of that and turn that into something else? Maybe it's not a complete textbook, but maybe it's something else that could still be an OER that's really useful to people.
Another technique I've used is faculty who originally start out thinking that they're going to write a completely original textbook all themselves and then it gets to be a lot of work. So I suggest, "Would you consider adapting materials? Can I show you some of these other open textbooks in criminal justice that have been written? Could you take some of those pieces and then add in the local context for your students to make it easier for them?"
So that's been my approach, but similarly, I've never said to an author, "We're not doing this anymore." I've even had authors leave the institution and move to another institution and we still said we would keep working with them from their new institution.
Apurva: What I'm picking up in your story, Annie and Anita, and perhaps maybe what was missing from Amanda's story in the chat is open communication. I think that's very, very important in these types of relationships because as Annie was saying, it could be a variety of reasons that a project isn't working out. So the first step in those cases would be to understand what is happening. Is it a lack of time? Is it a lack of resources? Is there something happening in that author's maybe personal or professional life that is causing a drain and preventing them from succeeding in this project as they should or not delivering the drafts as expected on time or as agreed upon. It's important to remember that you might need to operate from more of an emotional support capacity first to understand what the root of the problem is before making that decision.
If you do, you don't need to feel bad for doing so. As Annie said, you could think about, "Well, what can I salvage from the months of work that have gone by?" or as Anita and Amanda are suggesting, maybe inform the author and say, "We're not asking this all together. We're putting this on pause. We encourage you to apply again next year and we'll see how it goes. Hopefully, you're in a better position to be able to move forward or hopefully, we have the resources, the technology that you need to do this more successfully." So stopping a project now doesn't mean you can't pick it up in the future. So feel empowered to say no if your gut and if all of the signs and signals and information you have are leading you in that direction.
Mandi: I would just add that, one thing that ... So when we've started our grant program, obviously, we wanted to create open textbooks and actually build things, but the top priority I think then was just to grow awareness of open education in general. So we definitely had some less than stellar grant projects, but we moved forward with them anyway. Yeah, we had some people who it was just that they, like Amanda is saying in the chat, they just went missing and we couldn't reach them. We couldn't get to them at all, but I think, so one aspect of our grant program is the faculty member isn't just creating something. They also have to do some small advocacy thing. So they have to be a little testimonial at one of my open textbook workshops or they have to create a little video or something.
In a way, that is allowing us to at least get something for the grant money that we're giving them even if, hopefully, there's a final product, but even if there isn't, we still worked with someone and raised awareness and gotten some advocacy out of it as well.
Anita: I'm connecting what you just said, Mandi, with what Apurva said earlier about your goals for creating OER and will drive how you interact with people and what that work looks like, what your relationship with those authors look like. So it sounds like you're still able to reach some of your goals even though the materials weren't quite what you thought they should be.
So seeing some conversation in the chat about one person who ... So this is Amanda saying, "In the grant program I used to run, I only had to end a grant because the person went completely missing in action. We reached out multiple times, got silence or excuses, and after they missed a milestone project check in and sent a we're not going to do this anymore email with information about why, and that they would be allowed to reapply in the next cycle with no guarantee that they'd be able to get in. They weren't paid anything yet at that point."
Then Phoebe has a really great thought, too, "We've had a couple of instances where authors stepped away from the project. One was a bad fit. One was life circumstances. We ended up asking them what percentage of the project they thought they did in order to determine what portion of the stipend they should receive." Those are really great ways to both honor the time that someone has put into something and to try to also preserve that relationship.
So I'd love to see if there are others on this call who have encountered these situations where a project is not progressing as it should and needs to either be put in pause or how did you handle that. So please add this in the chat if you have stories that you want to tell.
Let's see. I'm going to talk a little bit about tools. We've talked a lot about relationships, but I breezed very quickly through the managing the project management tools. I'm wondering, Mandi, you alluded to this. You said you used teams to organize your projects. Besides the specific software, what kinds of tasks do you try to track, and what do you think are most important to keep an eye on in terms of things that you feel like need to be managed in this process? Obviously, money, but other kinds of things. How do you keep things going? That's for Mandi, as well as the other panelists.
Mandi: Well, I mean, so I will say recently we started offering peer review as part of our publishing process, and that really helped us up the organization of everything because we had to be very careful about what's finished and what has gone out to a peer reviewer and has it gotten back and do we have a final version. So that was a lot of managing the pieces and parts. Yeah, I mean, mostly it's about deliverables, about what have they turned in, and when we're working with Pressbooks, we can keep an eye on that pretty easily. I don't know, Barb, if you have anything else.
Barbara: No. Just staying connected really helps with the author. It helps so they don't go missing in action, as you say, but that doesn't always help. It's just trying to stay connected is helpful.
Apurva: I'll maybe drop in a link to a chapter that I co-authored with Stephanie Buck in Oregon that talks about project management tools, especially those file management tools, in particular, can be very helpful if an author leaves the institution and somebody else steps in. So you have a lot of documentation that either handover to the next person. I find being organized and staying on track in those ways can be super helpful not just if someone steps into the project midway as an author, but also to help you juggle multiple projects because, for the author, it's just the one they're working on, but you might be overseeing four or five different grants or more, maybe 20 over that year.
I will just note in terms of technology, we always try to assign one technology point of support. So regardless of whether the tool is Manifold or Pressbooks or H5P or PubPub or Overleaf, as long as the author knows, "Who is the person I can contact when I'm confused about the features of this particular tool? Where do I go? What do I do?" As long as they know who it is they can lean on, they can communicate and go from there.
Annie: Apurva, your point assumes that there are multiple folks who are working to support these publications, which is not always the case, but yeah, it's well taken. I think you're right. Yeah. I mean, what was challenging for us is that we had not just our team in the library publishing side working on these projects, but we also had support from some press staff that used an entirely different workflow for projects than we were using. We also sometimes would bring in our library graphic designer who mostly worked on promotional pieces and communication stuff for the library. So she also had a different project management tool that she used with her communications team. So getting everyone on the same page and working together was really, really tricky. We generally use Google Sheets, which I don't think is necessarily the best, but at least everyone knows how to use it.
Anita: As you have all been talking, I've been frantically looking for a publication that just came out, the OER Starter Kit for Program Managers.
Annie: I just dropped in a link to that, Anita.
Anita: Okay. I have missed that, but this is a guide that Apurva and several others in the open education community worked on for the last, I don't know, two or three years. This is a pandemic project, apparently, but take a look at this. I have not yet read it, but I think it would be very interesting for a lot of folks. I'd also say that Rebus guide for creating open textbooks so far is helpful, as well as the OEN curriculum and the different guides that you already have access to.
So we have one more question in the chat and question is, "Mandi, what tasks did you give to the intern?" So you had an intern. What did the intern do and how did that go? So it sounds like interns might be a possibility for this person.
Mandi: Yes. Hi, Rumyana. It's nice to see you here. So we gave him a lot of leeway to choose what he wanted to do because this was unpaid, so it was really very much what would help you. The main project that he did was we wanted to do more marketing of what we had already published because we had done very little. So we organized a panel of authors during Open Education week and we had four of our authors that Jameson, our intern, did the asking of the questions of our panel and they talked about their experience and we invited people from around the state to attend on our own campus, and it was really great. I think even though it was a nerve-wracking experience for him, he really enjoyed it.
Then we also have him doing things like looking for ... We have a faculty member who's publishing something in Pressbooks. She wanted to use images from her PowerPoint slides, but we weren't sure if they were all openly licensed or in the public domain or what the situation was. So he was going through and reviewing and finding, when possible, openly licensed options for those. Then I think he was doing some other things in Pressbooks. Barb, do you...
Barbara: Yeah. I did training for him in Pressbooks and I think he was going to upload the images into Pressbooks as well working with the media part of it. I dropped in that video if you want to see with the intern, into chat, if you're all interested.
Mandi: Yeah. We just recently recorded a lightning talk about our experience for Open Cleveland. So you can watch about that.
Anita: That's great. So we are very fast running out of time. I just want to say thank you so much for all of you who joined us today. Thank you, Mandi, Barbara, Annie, and Apurva. Thank you to the organizers of this event, some of whom I will probably not be able to name, so Karen, Amanda, Carla, and I apologize if there are others that I missed, but we are grateful that you have joined us as we continue to learn about open textbook publishing. We are still learning as you might notice, and we hope to continue to share available resources and recommendations.
One of the key takeaways is that you're not alone in figuring out how to support open textbook authors and that the learning continues. So if you have more questions about today's session or you'd like to chat with others about it, please use the class notes. We will review the notes before the following session to answer any outstanding questions, and we look forward to seeing you all next week. So thank you so much for joining us today.
END OF VIDEO
Chat Transcript
00:15:29 Apurva Ashok: Hello everyone! Hope you are all doing well.
00:15:38 Mandi Goodsett (she/her): Hi everybody!
00:16:05 Barb Loomis: Hi from Cleveland
00:16:10 Michele Behr: Raining here in Kalamazoo, MI.
00:16:11 Jodie Morin: Storm Lake, IA. Beautiful day here, too!
00:16:20 Heather Caprette: Hello Everyone! I'm joining from NE Ohio. Thankful for my family's health.
00:16:29 Mary Ann Cullen: Hi from Atlanta, GA. Gorgeous spring day here!
00:16:31 Megan Lowe: Sunny, hell-hot day in Natchitoches, LA!
00:16:33 Angie Balius: Hello from Hammond, LA. I'm thankful for collaborative educators and librarians like this group. :)
00:16:34 Sara Dustin: Joining from Naples, FL!
00:16:38 Cathy Germano: Greetings from Albany NY!
00:16:39 Cliff Smith: fargo ND. Just glad winter is over!
00:16:39 Michele Leigh: Carbondale, Il I am grateful that it just rained on my newly planted fruit trees
00:16:46 Annie Johnson: Hi from Philly! Grateful for my garden and the spring harvest.
00:16:47 Raya Samet: Hi from Detroit, Michigan. :-)
00:16:48 Iris Fiallos: Iris from Florida. Thankful that the people from the Ukraine are fighters for good.
00:16:50 Megan Lowe: Said it well, Anita!
00:16:53 Cheryl (Cuillier) Casey: Hi from the U of AZ
00:16:53 Susan Whitmer: Howdy from Denton, TX! Hotter n H***!
00:16:53 Michele Behr: Thankful for my colleague who refilled the office candy dish today
00:16:53 Jason Yamashita: Good morning/afternoon. Aloha from Oahu, Hawaii.
00:17:03 Stacy Anderson: Hello from Big Rapids, Michigan. It's very green outside!
00:17:33 Cliff Smith: @michelle behr, Candy is a good idea. thanks!
00:24:18 Annie Johnson: Yes! I like to say, "you can add that to the 2nd edition!”
00:27:14 Amanda Larson: I love that gif
00:27:38 Cliff Smith: Right?!
00:28:28 Anita Walz: Link to slides: https://bit.ly/Pub101_working_with_authors
00:28:54 Cathy Germano: Thank you Anita!?
00:30:55 Anita Walz: https://engagedscholarship.csuohio.edu/oer
00:31:40 Heather Caprette: https://pressbooks.ulib.csuohio.edu/
00:32:12 Heather Caprette: https://www.overleaf.com/ for LaTex
00:33:23 Anita Walz: +1 to a positive OER experience too with CSU!
00:34:14 Amanda Larson: Yay Annie!
00:34:20 Cheryl (Cuillier) Casey: In a multi-institutional Pressbooks collaboration, how did you decide which Pressbooks instance to use?
00:35:48 Mandi Goodsett (she/her): Good question, Cheryl. For that project we actually were collaborating to create ancillary materials, so we didn't use Pressbooks for that one. But VT took the lead on hosting the final product because they were already hosting the accompanying textbook.
00:36:32 Anita Walz: Test bank request environment is here: http://hdl.handle.net/10919/104179
00:37:56 Anita Walz: Mandi, I and our faculty also gave this presentation on the project at the Open Education Conference in 2022: https://sched.co/moU0
00:39:04 Anne Marie Gruber: I appreciate the author archetypes you shared, @annie! I see all 3 in the same grant project I'm running right now.
00:48:23 Phoebe Daurio: That's a great reminder Apurva, thank you!
00:51:27 Apurva Ashok: Yes! Being kind and flexible is so important — to yourself and others - as this is is all relationship-based work!
00:53:25 Michele Behr: Is there a point when it's clear that the project is not going to be successful and you all agree to call an end to it?
00:55:18 Jamey Harris: The professor becomes the student.
00:58:21 Amanda Larson: In the program I used to run I only had to end a grant because the person went completely MIA. We reached out multiple times, and got silence or excuses, and after they missed a milestone project check in - we sent a we're not going to do this anymore email with information about why and that we would allow them to reapply next cycle (with no guarantee that they'd get back in).
00:59:00 Cheryl (Cuillier) Casey: @Amanda - had part of the stipend money been paid by then? Do you just write it off as a loss?
00:59:37 Amanda Larson: We had not paid out anything yet, the milestone they missed would have triggered that payment.
01:01:27 Phoebe Daurio: We've had a couple of instances where authors "stepped away from the project" - one was a bad fit, and one was life circumstances. We ended up asking them what % of the project they thought they did in order to determine what portion of the stipend they should receive.
01:01:44 Annie Johnson: That's a good idea Phoebe!
01:01:55 Anita Walz: Great idea, Phoebe
01:02:39 Phoebe Daurio: Mandi, I love those other options!
01:06:19 Apurva Ashok: https://press.rebus.community/oerstarterkitpm/chapter/chapter-16-project-management/
01:06:22 Rumyana Hristova: Mandi, what tasks did you give to the intern?
01:08:24 Apurva Ashok: Very fair! Collaborative projects are my bread and butter so I tend to use that as my default. ?
01:09:39 Apurva Ashok: https://press.rebus.community/the-rebus-guide-to-publishing-open-textbooks/
01:11:00 Barb Loomis: https://engagedscholarship.csuohio.edu/msl_video/2/
01:11:34 Anita Walz: Attendees likely already know about this but just in case: Authoring Open Textbooks: https://oen.pressbooks.pub/authoropen
01:12:01 Rumyana Hristova: Thank you! Great to see you!
01:12:07 Carla Myers: Thanks for a great presentation/conversation everyone!
01:12:08 Cheryl (Cuillier) Casey: Thank you all!
01:12:12 Karen Lauritsen: Thank you for a fantastic panel! Really appreciate all of what you shared.
01:12:22 Barb Loomis: Thanks Anita!
01:12:36 Apurva Ashok: Thank you all for your time; and thanks to the Open Education Network for inviting us to be a part of this discussion!
01:13:00 Karen Lauritsen: Hope to see you next week for our final Pub101 meeting!
01:13:02 Heather Caprette: https://youtu.be/mGTbDqd7m_0
01:13:03 Annie Johnson: Thank you all! This was fun. ?
01:13:05 Mandi Goodsett (she/her): Thank you all very much for attending!
01:13:09 Amanda Larson: Thanks!
00:15:38 Mandi Goodsett (she/her): Hi everybody!
00:16:05 Barb Loomis: Hi from Cleveland
00:16:10 Michele Behr: Raining here in Kalamazoo, MI.
00:16:11 Jodie Morin: Storm Lake, IA. Beautiful day here, too!
00:16:20 Heather Caprette: Hello Everyone! I'm joining from NE Ohio. Thankful for my family's health.
00:16:29 Mary Ann Cullen: Hi from Atlanta, GA. Gorgeous spring day here!
00:16:31 Megan Lowe: Sunny, hell-hot day in Natchitoches, LA!
00:16:33 Angie Balius: Hello from Hammond, LA. I'm thankful for collaborative educators and librarians like this group. :)
00:16:34 Sara Dustin: Joining from Naples, FL!
00:16:38 Cathy Germano: Greetings from Albany NY!
00:16:39 Cliff Smith: fargo ND. Just glad winter is over!
00:16:39 Michele Leigh: Carbondale, Il I am grateful that it just rained on my newly planted fruit trees
00:16:46 Annie Johnson: Hi from Philly! Grateful for my garden and the spring harvest.
00:16:47 Raya Samet: Hi from Detroit, Michigan. :-)
00:16:48 Iris Fiallos: Iris from Florida. Thankful that the people from the Ukraine are fighters for good.
00:16:50 Megan Lowe: Said it well, Anita!
00:16:53 Cheryl (Cuillier) Casey: Hi from the U of AZ
00:16:53 Susan Whitmer: Howdy from Denton, TX! Hotter n H***!
00:16:53 Michele Behr: Thankful for my colleague who refilled the office candy dish today
00:16:53 Jason Yamashita: Good morning/afternoon. Aloha from Oahu, Hawaii.
00:17:03 Stacy Anderson: Hello from Big Rapids, Michigan. It's very green outside!
00:17:33 Cliff Smith: @michelle behr, Candy is a good idea. thanks!
00:24:18 Annie Johnson: Yes! I like to say, "you can add that to the 2nd edition!”
00:27:14 Amanda Larson: I love that gif
00:27:38 Cliff Smith: Right?!
00:28:28 Anita Walz: Link to slides: https://bit.ly/Pub101_working_with_authors
00:28:54 Cathy Germano: Thank you Anita!?
00:30:55 Anita Walz: https://engagedscholarship.csuohio.edu/oer
00:31:40 Heather Caprette: https://pressbooks.ulib.csuohio.edu/
00:32:12 Heather Caprette: https://www.overleaf.com/ for LaTex
00:33:23 Anita Walz: +1 to a positive OER experience too with CSU!
00:34:14 Amanda Larson: Yay Annie!
00:34:20 Cheryl (Cuillier) Casey: In a multi-institutional Pressbooks collaboration, how did you decide which Pressbooks instance to use?
00:35:48 Mandi Goodsett (she/her): Good question, Cheryl. For that project we actually were collaborating to create ancillary materials, so we didn't use Pressbooks for that one. But VT took the lead on hosting the final product because they were already hosting the accompanying textbook.
00:36:32 Anita Walz: Test bank request environment is here: http://hdl.handle.net/10919/104179
00:37:56 Anita Walz: Mandi, I and our faculty also gave this presentation on the project at the Open Education Conference in 2022: https://sched.co/moU0
00:39:04 Anne Marie Gruber: I appreciate the author archetypes you shared, @annie! I see all 3 in the same grant project I'm running right now.
00:48:23 Phoebe Daurio: That's a great reminder Apurva, thank you!
00:51:27 Apurva Ashok: Yes! Being kind and flexible is so important — to yourself and others - as this is is all relationship-based work!
00:53:25 Michele Behr: Is there a point when it's clear that the project is not going to be successful and you all agree to call an end to it?
00:55:18 Jamey Harris: The professor becomes the student.
00:58:21 Amanda Larson: In the program I used to run I only had to end a grant because the person went completely MIA. We reached out multiple times, and got silence or excuses, and after they missed a milestone project check in - we sent a we're not going to do this anymore email with information about why and that we would allow them to reapply next cycle (with no guarantee that they'd get back in).
00:59:00 Cheryl (Cuillier) Casey: @Amanda - had part of the stipend money been paid by then? Do you just write it off as a loss?
00:59:37 Amanda Larson: We had not paid out anything yet, the milestone they missed would have triggered that payment.
01:01:27 Phoebe Daurio: We've had a couple of instances where authors "stepped away from the project" - one was a bad fit, and one was life circumstances. We ended up asking them what % of the project they thought they did in order to determine what portion of the stipend they should receive.
01:01:44 Annie Johnson: That's a good idea Phoebe!
01:01:55 Anita Walz: Great idea, Phoebe
01:02:39 Phoebe Daurio: Mandi, I love those other options!
01:06:19 Apurva Ashok: https://press.rebus.community/oerstarterkitpm/chapter/chapter-16-project-management/
01:06:22 Rumyana Hristova: Mandi, what tasks did you give to the intern?
01:08:24 Apurva Ashok: Very fair! Collaborative projects are my bread and butter so I tend to use that as my default. ?
01:09:39 Apurva Ashok: https://press.rebus.community/the-rebus-guide-to-publishing-open-textbooks/
01:11:00 Barb Loomis: https://engagedscholarship.csuohio.edu/msl_video/2/
01:11:34 Anita Walz: Attendees likely already know about this but just in case: Authoring Open Textbooks: https://oen.pressbooks.pub/authoropen
01:12:01 Rumyana Hristova: Thank you! Great to see you!
01:12:07 Carla Myers: Thanks for a great presentation/conversation everyone!
01:12:08 Cheryl (Cuillier) Casey: Thank you all!
01:12:12 Karen Lauritsen: Thank you for a fantastic panel! Really appreciate all of what you shared.
01:12:22 Barb Loomis: Thanks Anita!
01:12:36 Apurva Ashok: Thank you all for your time; and thanks to the Open Education Network for inviting us to be a part of this discussion!
01:13:00 Karen Lauritsen: Hope to see you next week for our final Pub101 meeting!
01:13:02 Heather Caprette: https://youtu.be/mGTbDqd7m_0
01:13:03 Annie Johnson: Thank you all! This was fun. ?
01:13:05 Mandi Goodsett (she/her): Thank you all very much for attending!
01:13:09 Amanda Larson: Thanks!
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