Estimated reading time for this article:
26
minutes.
Speakers:
Amanda Larson (Affordable Learning Instructional Consultant, The Ohio State University)
Abbey Elder (Open Access & Scholarly Communication Librarian, Iowa State University)
Amanda: All right. It has slowed down. I'm going to go ahead and get started. Hi everybody. Welcome to the Open Education Network's Pub101. Thank you for joining us in today's session. I'm Amanda Larson. You're super familiar with me by now. And I am today's host and facilitator, and I am going to put in the chat a link to our orientation roadmap. It includes the schedule and links to the session slides and video recordings. And then soon, I'm going to hand it off to Abbey Elder, who is joining us today from Iowa State University and who's going to talk to us about working with authors.
As always, we're going to leave time for your questions and conversation, as there might be many of you who are already experts and have experiences to share and meaningful additions to share among each other, and I hope that you will do that. I love the chat of this group, sharing resources and ideas. Here are a few housekeeping details. So the webinar is being recorded. You should have got the little popup that said, "Hey, this webinar is being recorded." And it's going to be added to our spring 2023 YouTube playlist. Let me grab the link to that for y'all.
I'll throw that in the chat. There we go. And then as always, we are committed to providing a friendly, safe, and welcoming environment for everyone aligned with our community norms. So we hope that you'll join us in creating a safe and constructive space, and I will put the link in for the community norms, in case you want to refresh your memory. Oh, no. Maybe that's right. We'll see if that's the right link. And then please remember that also there is a companion resource for these sessions, the Pub101 Canvas curriculum, which you can find at the following link. So if you need to check out any of the information that was covered around working with authors that's in the curriculum, you can do so there. And now I'm going to turn things over to Abbey to talk about working with authors. Take it away, Abbey.
Abbey: All right, thank you. So now I get to try to share my screen and we'll hope that everything goes well. Let's see. Can you see?
Amanda: It is in Google slide mode and not presentation mode.
Abbey: I gotcha. There you go. I want to make sure first. Okay. And now we're good?
Amanda: Yeah. Okay. You're good to go.
Abbey: All right. Thank you everyone for coming today and listening to me talk a little bit about working with authors. This is going to be mostly talking about my personal experiences and specific examples of how I've worked with authors in our OER publishing program here at Iowa State University. But to get started, so for those of you who don't already know me, who the heck am I? So I am the open access and scholarly communication librarian at Iowa State University. In this role, I lead ISU's Open Education Program. I support authors who want to identify OER that they can remix or use in their courses. I also support the publication of open educational resources from ISU authors, and I oversee our open access programs, like our open access read and publish agreements and a bunch of other stuff too. I won't get into it here, but that's the general gist.
So what is my publishing context here? So OER publishing at Iowa State University was first supported in 2018 with launch of our open education mini grant program. So we got some funding. We were able to support funding additional open educational resources that authors didn't otherwise have support or time to create. And then in 2019, we also had our digital press started up with the leadership of Harrison Inefuku, our scholarly publishing services librarian at the helm.
One moment. The ISU Digital Press has one staff member, Harrison, and I help with OER production. So in this way, our publishing context might be a little bit unique where we do have a press, we do have publishing support and grants and a program. But we don't necessarily have a publishing system with multiple staff supporting it. It's really Harrison manages the press and I support OER production. So to talk a little bit about working with authors specifically, I'm going to talk about three examples of different authors I've worked with on projects and the different ways that communicating and working with these authors on specific open textbook projects have gone.
First, we have "the self-starter." So this is the person who is really good at just getting out there, getting stuff done and doing things on their own. It started out pretty simple with me training them on how to get started, getting them going with our template for putting their content together, and giving them resources for best practices and accessibility and design. Then they basically ran with it and did the rest. I checked in with them at key points in their projects design. I made sure that they got their content imported over. But most of the work they got done themselves and everything was done on time, a-okay.
The second person I call "the collaborator." So very early on in their project, they decided they did not want to do it all on their own. They wanted to have us be partners in this process. So they explained their project and their needs. We worked together to draft H5P exercises for their open textbook. I helped them import their content into Pressbooks. I made edits for design, accessibility and inclusion, and also worked with them on some of the content in the book where I understood a little bit of the content as a subject matter expert myself. And then they've relied heavily on me during the editing and refining phase of their project as well. So this one came together very well. It was an exciting experience. And the final project has been commended for its content presentation, but it was a lot more work than that first one.
And then we have the author that I would call "the unhurried." During their projects onboarding, again, we always start with that basic introduction to what we're doing, what's available, and how things work. They explained to me that they would need frequent check-ins. They completed their work on a chapter-by-chapter basis to accommodate a flexible schedule. And chapters are individually peer reviewed, copyedited and imported into our publishing platform. So bit by bit, they're getting things done as they need to, and I check in with them fairly regularly. In fact, weekly we have check-ins to ensure that I'm up to date on their project and they know what they have to do next. So every week, we meet for about 20 minutes to talk about where they are. At this point, it's been about two years and we have five chapters complete of the 13 we need to get things published.
So these are the three very different examples obviously of different ways that working with authors might go. You might have someone who is exactly what you expect to experience. They are the self-starter, they get going, they get done. It's all good. It might be a surprising experience where you get more out of it, but it also takes a little bit more out of you in the process, or it might be completely different from what you expected where it takes a lot more time and things don't quite go to plan. Now, there are pros and cons for each of these experiences. As I say here, the self-starter was low maintenance. But the things that they created at the end of the day were not creative. They were not particularly attractive. And until we did our reviews and came back and said, "Here are the things you need to fix", they were inaccessible because although I provided them with the resources for best practices to say, "Here are the things you need to meet", they didn't necessarily look over those or take them to heart.
The collaborator was really great to work with and they made a great OER, but it was a high maintenance experience. And because our relationship was set up at too informal of a level, they asked for support outside of working hours. And that made it a harder situation for me to deal with personally. And the unhurried, while they were reliable, they listened to my advice. I still like working with them. But because they changed their plans often and things need to be spaced out fairly well, project management can be difficult.
So this isn't an all or nothing things get better or worse down the line. It's just different ways that interfacing with authors can change. And this is because authors are not necessarily a monolith. They're all individuals. They're people. And the issues we faced did not necessarily stem from them or from me alone. There are problems that I could have headed off with the collaborator by setting better boundaries for myself and their expectations for me. And there are things happening for the unhurried or for the self-starter that I need to account for myself or that can't be accounted for, like health or personal issues.
So what can you learn from my mistakes? Or more specifically, what can you learn from the experiences that I've gone through here? Well, working with authors is all about respect for each other, as people and for you and your time. You need to respect that they have their own needs and expectations and they need to respect that you are an individual worthy of actually being seen as a collaborator and part of this process. You need to manage expectations for you and for them, so it's clear what parts of their production design and final publication process each of you is handling. You need to communicate enough. And this varies. Weekly works for me and the unhurried person on my list. But it does not have to be weekly. It could be monthly, it could be quarterly. Whatever makes sense for the project that you're working with.
And you need to develop shared goals for what the project will be. So what do you expect to get out of this and how can you make sure that you're meeting each other's goals? We're going to talk a little bit more through each of these things in a second. So questions to ask as you're working with authors and getting things started. First, what does the author want? And this is the big picture, the "If I could have this, this would be awesome." What is the purpose of their project, their desired end result, their timeline and their preferences for technology, art and licenses? So what does this need to be? What do they really want this to accomplish on a larger scale to support their students, to be the best introductory engineering book in the world? Do they want it to be a textbook? Do they want it to be modules? Do they want it to be something interactive and alternative?
What is their timeline? So do they want this to be a year long project or are they okay with it going longer? And then those other preferences, those are things that you'll need to dial in on, on just how much it's a preference versus a need for them, which goes into what can the author actually do? Because while they might want a lot of these things, what they're capable and able to put into their project will determine what you're able to finally do at the end of the day.
Their position might dictate this. If they're a full-time professor, then they might have more leeway in how they spend their time, than an adjunct that's working at three different institutions. Their teaching load will definitely play a role in this, whether they're teaching three courses this semester or excessive courses because there's a lack of instructors in their field, if they have funds available that they contribute to pay off some of their time, or if they have support from their department. I've worked with students in faculty where they have two or three TAs that do most of the work, and the faculty member just gives them notes on what to do next. And I've worked with some authors where they're doing this on the weekends and the time that they have available. It really differs depending on who you're working with as an individual. And setting up the expectations on a one-by-one basis can help you get an idea of what's possible for that project.
And then what can you do? So as you're thinking through a project and an author and getting things set up, you need to ask them and ask yourself, "What is it that you're going to do for their project?" Will you be managing the workflows? Flushing out the timelines, scheduling the check-ins? And generally, what you'll need to do is communicate those expectations upfront. Who does what and what can be delegated and what expectations are reasonable? So like I said a minute ago, what can the author do? There's a lot of different changes there.
And you might think, "Well, if it's an adjunct that only has time on the weekends and they really want to do this cool project and I really care about it, then I should contribute more of my time." But what expectations are reasonable for you, should really think about what expectations you're setting in place for the long haul as well. Because over time, this instructor, this author, is going to come to expect the same level of support or let other people know about how great it was working with you because you did certain things for them. And making it clear that you are making an exception or that you cannot do certain things upfront might be hard. But it'll be better in the long run to make sure that your expectations you're setting are the same for authors across the board.
So what can you not do? You need to be clear about the non-negotiables and what you're able to do and what you're not. So are there services you don't offer or projects that you won't take on? Can you support an author's platform preferences, like different things that are more technically minded, open source, or have specific requirements that you might not be an expert in? Do you not allow certain fonts or color choices? I had one author that really wanted ... I like this pink and purple across their book, and I had to say, "No, we cannot do that. That is not in our style guide. Here is our rules." And can you accommodate closed projects or ones with no derivatives licenses? Generally, it's best to think about what are your hard lines on things? What will you say no to? Because if you have some guidelines in place for that, it's easier to say no when it comes up later.
Some things like can the author leave out alt text and have you do it later? Really obvious, no. Things need to be accessible. We need you to do this work because it's best practices. Other things like fonts and color choices are a little bit harder to take a hard line stance on. So figuring out where you fall on each of these sorts of questions is an important part of this process. And remember, this is a team effort. So you are not the single sole person doing all of this work all the time. Even if you're supposedly like me, the main person doing OER work on your campus, the main person doing OER production support, there's still other people you can get in touch with to support authors as they're developing projects, like IT experts, instructional designers, librarians, accessibility support. Different people across campus who can be part of this process, even if they're not explicitly part of a press or a publishing program explicitly.
I especially like the note of instructional designers because since I first started working on some of these projects I outlined earlier, we have integrated our instructional design support into our program for publishing where from the very start, if they're working with an author or a faculty member who is redesigning their course and they think there's a lot of great content here, the author wants to repackage it into their course to be more modular, why don't we look and see if they're willing to make it in OER to share it out? And that collaboration across it has helped us also expand our publishing, in addition to getting more support for helping instructors as they're doing this work. So how do you onboard new authors?
First is obviously the planning meeting where you get started and think about how this is all is going to work. This might be a discussion about a bunch of different things like what is your OER going to be? How many chapters will it be? What format will it be in? What's the general process for working with us and working with them on getting their project up and running?
And is there anything that might be tricky about the project, like math, multiple languages, complex tables? And what expectations is there as a whole? So this is the from a hundred feet up, looking down, what does the project look like? And the planning meeting is really important because it helps you understand at the very beginning also how much of this work is already done. Sometimes, authors will come in and they already have a full first draft of something they've been working on for 10 years. And sometimes, they'll come in with a general idea of what they want to do someday. And the difference between these two is pretty stark. So knowing what you're getting into is an important part of whether you're willing to or able to take on a project.
Next, you can set those expectations for the workflows. In addition to what they have already, what they want to do and what your workflow looks like, you need to think about the platforms you're working with. Do you use Manifold, LibreTexts, Pressbooks, Word? Is there some specific format that you prefer people start their work in or finish their work in? Should they prepare a sample chapter for review or can they just get going and get done? And then think about who's responsible for different aspects of your work. For example, formatting, cover art design, accessibility reviews, copyediting, peer review. Are there different people that do all these things? Is it all you or someone else on your team? Good things to know about.
And remember, once again, setting these guidelines early on from what you can expect from authors and what they can expect from you, can prevent scope creep from setting in later. You do not want to all of a sudden find that you're expected to do all of these things because you did it once or twice. I would know. Next we have communication tips. So you've talked to authors, you've got an idea of their project, you've got an idea of where they're going to be putting things together and how it'll work. So how do you keep up to date with them as they're getting their work done? Well, first, you want to find out what sort of communication methods work best for you two as a group or all of you, if there's more than two of you. Email, phone, Zoom, in person, messenger apps, project management tools. Even Twitter or things like Slack and Discord have been used for different sorts of projects.
Generally, I say keep it to the same thing. You're with different authors, but with some authors you might be more or less formal with them. But figure out what works best for you. And set up regular check-ins. This might be monthly, bimonthly, quarterly. Again, whatever works best for you, to go over where their project is and what timeline changes might be necessary, because as people get to work on open textbooks specifically, but any sort of OER then they might find that plans change, life things happen, and accounting for that is good to know earlier rather than later.
And here I have a very important tip. So a lot of the times when I'm working with authors, we get to this point where we're talking regularly, we have a plan, they're drafting their content, they think they're ready to go. But they don't want to publish it yet. They don't think it's ready. It needs more time, it needs to be beefed up. There needs to be more in it, or it needs to have more contributors. Well, remember that OER can be an iterative process. OER development means it can grow and change and develop both at your own institution and as it's adapted and adopted by others. It's best to reinforce with authors that they can continue to build on their resources over time and that if they don't publish it now, if they don't publish it even when it's good enough and they're going to be using it in their course anyway, it's not doing anyone else any good.
It's not going to be able to be open and shared and useful for other people like it already is good enough for them. So remembering that can be pretty useful for those who might be hesitant to publish right now. So what's my new process? I've talked a little bit about my old process, which is whatever works. But my new process is first meeting with the authors about their project, their scope and timeline and needs, discussing the capabilities of our tools, things like how does Pressbooks work? You can add text boxes, videos, H5P, et cetera. We train authors on accessibility, formatting content and share the contact info for campus partners like our instructional design office and student accessibility services.
We have an import template and instructions for sharing image files so they know how to prepare content for import in Pressbooks from Word. And then they share their completed files with us, so we import it for them. That way expectations are set and we know that things are getting put in place how they need to be. Finally, authors will let us know if they want to do peer review, and reviews are completed with the Word files prior to import, if that's the best thing for that project.
So that's my old process. And what happens if things still go wrong? Because they do, things still do go wrong sometimes. You might run into communication author issues with authors or collaborators working with them. You might have schedule changes come up, like things just suddenly go wrong. Grant payouts might be stalled due to issues completely beyond your control. Personal emergencies, yours or theirs could come up. And there may be staffing changes like the person that you typically worked with in accessibility services accepts a job at MIT. And all of a sudden, you have no accessibility contact person on campus and have to figure that out. Not my personal experience, but things happen. So what do you do in these sorts of situations? You can't just say, "Oh, I'm sorry, I can't publish your book anymore", or, "It looks like things just won't work out."
You have to find some way around it to offer some comfort, support. Anything that might help things keep moving forward. So when you're navigating these roadblocks, it's best to first evaluate and edit your schedule as necessary. It's okay to make changes. It's okay to say, "There's a delay. We'll put that down and set new expectations." You can refer back to those earlier discussions you had about what the expectations were, what you were doing and what's expected of the author and you, so that you know, "Hey, we already talked about this. We knew what was going to happen if this couldn't be met. Well, changing that up, we're going to go back to those discussions and act accordingly."
You can reflect on what you can finish now or work on later. Like I said, OER can be iterative projects. If things look like it's going to be another year before we get the final chapter done of something, you can put out a 10 chapter book and say, "Chapter 11 coming next year." It happens. And it's best to think about what you can do later, next time this might come up, to avoid this happening again. Because sometimes, it's something that you can't account for, like someone breaks their leg. But other times it's things about your own university or systems that you get around for next time. And my final note here: Be flexible and understanding, because we cannot account for everything that might happen. Broken legs happen. And figuring out how that might affect your process, it doesn't need to be built into all of your workflows. But knowing that things change is an important part of all of this.
If you're encountering roadblocks like this and you feel like you can't get out of it, you don't know how to navigate around this problem, it's best to take a step back, determine who is stuck, first of all. Is it you or the author? Is it you just not being able to understand what you can do to get around this issue? Or the author who's saying they're unwilling to move with you in the right direction? Make sure that if you make a change, if you change the timeline or decide to publish with 10 instead of 11 chapters, the author agrees with you on that process. And if you do set a bad example early on, like me not setting quite enough boundaries between me and authors, you can enforce boundaries later on as a new workflow. You can say, "This is how things work now. We've made some changes to our process. This is what we've done."
So we've talked a little bit about my own personal experiences, things that you can do and things that you can do to get around issues as they arise. So how do we reflect and move on? If you run into a bad project or a project that just leaves a bad taste in your mouth, you should think about maybe set new standards and expectations for your work, taking a step back from publishing support for certain things, or maybe just refusing to work with that particular author in the future. You know the author in your circumstance. It's a different one from mine, but they happen. You can think about what makes the most sense for you. And it might be just that first point. It might be all three here. But making changes accordingly after something goes wrong, it happens. It's necessary.
In the end, you need to really balance those standards you want to set with the needs of your authors and the needs of you as a person and any team members you might have to support you. I love this note of your standards with their needs, their standards with your needs. What do they want and what can you offer, and what do you want versus what can they offer? Authors usually are not graphic designers. They cannot necessarily provide the most amazing beautiful things in the world. And either you have to accept that, or you have to find ways to support their needs and the ways that they can't do certain things themselves. You may need to alter your workflows to accommodate their needs and make sure things get done. And sometimes just saying, "You know what? This is good enough. We're going to push it out and it's going to be fine. And I will be okay with that", is also good enough, because really good content doesn't have to be beautiful content. And publishing is not all about making things that look really nice. Sometimes, being good and being useful is good enough.
The big thing that I really want to get across from this discussion about working with authors is not just there are some bad authors, there are some good authors. But the workflows that you set in place, the expectations that you set when working with people, are really what set you apart as someone who is able to do good work and feel good about it at the end of the day, and someone who is doing good work, but feeling a little bit burnt out at the end of the day.
So remember that you should take care of yourself as someone who is supporting OER publishing. You can say, "Not me", or just, "Not now. Maybe later." No one is entitled to your labor, especially if this is not your full-time job. I noted here it's not in my position description to support OER publishing. And you should leverage support that is available across your campus system or state. Especially, I know a lot of folks in Virginia, California, Oregon, Ohio, all across the US and outside of it, have a lot of support systems built into their local area that might be useful for publishing OER, or supporting them as you're getting this started. So now that I've talked way too much about myself, given some tips, given some ideas, let's talk about your own experiences and any questions you might have.
Amanda: Thank you so much, Abbey. We appreciate you sharing your experiences with today. And now we're going to switch into the Q&A. And you have a question that came in from Hailey. And it says, "With the timeline situation, I'm curious how one would balance the expectations of an MOU and stipend compensation, with a timeline that is not concrete, specifically thinking of the example of the unhurried author. I'd see how it would be beneficial for a range of faculty that do not have consistent time that can allot to an OER, but how would we compensate them for their time and count them for program justification? Thank you."
Abbey: Absolutely. So great example in part because the unhurried author has received funding and not completed their work yet. However, I think what's useful in this case is we did not have an MOU at that point. We do now for our grants. And it was a good example of why you also have MOUs. But to talk about the answer to yours, if you do run into a situation like this, how do you account for an MOU and stipend expectations, typically what I would say is you need to get to a point where something is a pilotable resource. So again, it's back to that it needs to be good enough to put out and to share. It needs to be good enough to count it as hitting the baseline for what you expect from a grant. And then after that, it can get through, "Now, we'll do the peer review. Now, we'll do the final edits. Now, we'll do the compilation."
And then it'll get to the part where the author really loves it and is happy with it, but you've already pushed it out and shared it with people so they can use it at their institutions. So in a way, having that MOU in place and having a harder deadline means that it's easier to make the case for, "Let's get to a good enough draft phase for now so we can share it. And then we'll do more of that finishing work, design, editing, formatting down the line."
Amanda: Follow-up question: "Would you consider releasing a resource chapter by chapter?"
Abbey: I would, depending on the resource. So this specific project, because we're editing it and putting it together chapter by chapter and copying it chapter by chapter, I have considered making it something where we put out the first 10 chapters as a completed book and then add a new chapter every couple of months. However, our digital press head has said, "That's not how book publishing works. Maybe we can not do that." So it'll be a discussion about ... Versioning gets harder that way because volume sizes get harder that way. And if we want to do print versions, again, that gets a little bit sticky. But it's an idea.
Amanda: Follow-up question. "Do you copyedit in-house or through third party?"
Abbey: Good questions.
Amanda: No, don't apologize for questions. We love questions here.
Abbey: Yeah, good, good questions. We do not copyedit in-house. We have a third party that we typically recommend if people have a grant that they go through. But for those that do not have grant funding and do not have any other means of getting copyediting support, I do go through resources and check the editing and general grammar and other things like that myself. And maybe that's something I should step back from as I am saying this out loud.
Amanda: Yay. You identified a boundary. Good job. Proud of you.
Abbey: One step at a time.
Amanda: Okay. I also have a question. Can you talk a little bit about your style guide and how you came to have a style guide, what's in your style guide, that kind of thing? And then we'll follow up with Natalia's question.
Abbey: Yes. So our style guide, typically we do not have a explicit everything has to be the citation style, everything has to be this sort of thing. It's more of the colors that we use in our text boxes. We have two separate versions, one for Iowa State colors for things that are university affiliated, like our accessibility toolkit, things from our office of no cheating. You know the office. Those guys.
Amanda: Excellent.
Abbey: Academic integrity.
Amanda: Integrity.
Abbey: So we use the ISU one for that, and then we use a separate set of colors for other textbooks. We also have requirements for which fonts we use in Pressbooks, both for the online and for the PDF versions. So people aren't using wacky fonts that have strange ways that they export. And then set standards for the width of pages, things like that. So it's not a you have to do certain, other style guides. It's not about the language or the style of the writing. It's more about consistency in how things look, because if for some authors for their field, they'll use APA, they'll use MLA, Chicago. And we don't want to change how that works for a biology professor.
Amanda: And then Natalia's question was: "Do you mind sharing who you recommend for copyediting?"
Abbey: I cannot. In part because we have a couple of different people. It's not like we recommend everyone goes through one group. We have one person that we've worked with before for the social sciences, and then we have another person that we've recommended for the hard sciences, and one person that we work with specifically for veterinary medicine.
Amanda: If you can't share names of people, can you talk maybe a little bit about how you identified those people?
Abbey: We ask for recommendations. In some cases, it helps that we have journals that are published through the digital press. So the journals have people that they typically work with and they can point us to. And in other cases, there are faculty or departments who have preferred folks.
Amanda: Thank you for sharing that link, Karen. Karen said that, "The OEN has a relationship with Scribe, which provides copyediting." Are there any more questions for Abbey?
Abbey: Since no one has asked yet, I am going to share a link to our template, which is really just an overview of formatting things for import into Pressbooks, which goes over things like if you have it set as a heading one, it'll start a new chapter. If you want to import specific formatting for tables, you can copy it from Word and it will come over in the import. But other things will not be imported using short codes, things like that. So it's a very short overview that might be useful for those of you that use that tool as well.
Amanda: Thank you. That is a very nice resource. If there aren't any more questions, I would like to remind you all that there is a survey that Karen linked in the chat and maybe she'll drop the link in the chat again. We would love to get your feedback about the Pub101 experience, this facilitated experience together, because we do use that feedback to iterate and make it better next time. So for example, we have taken Pub101 feedback on the curriculum and we have made revisions to the curriculum this time around. And now it's only I think three units instead of five. And we're thinking about future offerings, offerings that are more advanced, like maybe a Pub201 or 102 or something like that in the future. So your feedback is really useful. The committee will definitely discuss it and see what we can iterate.
All right, I don't see any more questions. So I'm going to go ahead and thank Abbey very much for sharing your time and expertise with us today. And then I want to thank you all for joining us as we learned about publishing and what OER publishing programs could look like together, and build a community of people who are interested in that topic. We hope that you will take the materials that you received through here through the program and use those, and that you will always remember that one of the key takeaways that we always emphasize is that you're not alone in this process.
There's a bunch of us who are trying to figure this all out again together. And so you have the class notes, which I will drop into the chat. If you have questions that you didn't get to ask or you are looking for information about what happened while you were here, you can always refer back to the class notes. But we want to thank you very much for your attendance and your generosity of spending time with us as we learned about this, for this series of Pub101.
END OF VIDEO
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Pub101 is a free, informal, online orientation to open textbook publishing. This May 18, 2023, session is the seventh and final episode in our series this year. Host Amanda Larson of The Ohio State University is joined by guest speaker Abbey Elder of Iowa State University to offer practical guidance on working with faculty 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.
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:
Amanda Larson (Affordable Learning Instructional Consultant, The Ohio State University)
Abbey Elder (Open Access & Scholarly Communication Librarian, Iowa State University)
Amanda: All right. It has slowed down. I'm going to go ahead and get started. Hi everybody. Welcome to the Open Education Network's Pub101. Thank you for joining us in today's session. I'm Amanda Larson. You're super familiar with me by now. And I am today's host and facilitator, and I am going to put in the chat a link to our orientation roadmap. It includes the schedule and links to the session slides and video recordings. And then soon, I'm going to hand it off to Abbey Elder, who is joining us today from Iowa State University and who's going to talk to us about working with authors.
As always, we're going to leave time for your questions and conversation, as there might be many of you who are already experts and have experiences to share and meaningful additions to share among each other, and I hope that you will do that. I love the chat of this group, sharing resources and ideas. Here are a few housekeeping details. So the webinar is being recorded. You should have got the little popup that said, "Hey, this webinar is being recorded." And it's going to be added to our spring 2023 YouTube playlist. Let me grab the link to that for y'all.
I'll throw that in the chat. There we go. And then as always, we are committed to providing a friendly, safe, and welcoming environment for everyone aligned with our community norms. So we hope that you'll join us in creating a safe and constructive space, and I will put the link in for the community norms, in case you want to refresh your memory. Oh, no. Maybe that's right. We'll see if that's the right link. And then please remember that also there is a companion resource for these sessions, the Pub101 Canvas curriculum, which you can find at the following link. So if you need to check out any of the information that was covered around working with authors that's in the curriculum, you can do so there. And now I'm going to turn things over to Abbey to talk about working with authors. Take it away, Abbey.
Abbey: All right, thank you. So now I get to try to share my screen and we'll hope that everything goes well. Let's see. Can you see?
Amanda: It is in Google slide mode and not presentation mode.
Abbey: I gotcha. There you go. I want to make sure first. Okay. And now we're good?
Amanda: Yeah. Okay. You're good to go.
Abbey: All right. Thank you everyone for coming today and listening to me talk a little bit about working with authors. This is going to be mostly talking about my personal experiences and specific examples of how I've worked with authors in our OER publishing program here at Iowa State University. But to get started, so for those of you who don't already know me, who the heck am I? So I am the open access and scholarly communication librarian at Iowa State University. In this role, I lead ISU's Open Education Program. I support authors who want to identify OER that they can remix or use in their courses. I also support the publication of open educational resources from ISU authors, and I oversee our open access programs, like our open access read and publish agreements and a bunch of other stuff too. I won't get into it here, but that's the general gist.
So what is my publishing context here? So OER publishing at Iowa State University was first supported in 2018 with launch of our open education mini grant program. So we got some funding. We were able to support funding additional open educational resources that authors didn't otherwise have support or time to create. And then in 2019, we also had our digital press started up with the leadership of Harrison Inefuku, our scholarly publishing services librarian at the helm.
One moment. The ISU Digital Press has one staff member, Harrison, and I help with OER production. So in this way, our publishing context might be a little bit unique where we do have a press, we do have publishing support and grants and a program. But we don't necessarily have a publishing system with multiple staff supporting it. It's really Harrison manages the press and I support OER production. So to talk a little bit about working with authors specifically, I'm going to talk about three examples of different authors I've worked with on projects and the different ways that communicating and working with these authors on specific open textbook projects have gone.
First, we have "the self-starter." So this is the person who is really good at just getting out there, getting stuff done and doing things on their own. It started out pretty simple with me training them on how to get started, getting them going with our template for putting their content together, and giving them resources for best practices and accessibility and design. Then they basically ran with it and did the rest. I checked in with them at key points in their projects design. I made sure that they got their content imported over. But most of the work they got done themselves and everything was done on time, a-okay.
The second person I call "the collaborator." So very early on in their project, they decided they did not want to do it all on their own. They wanted to have us be partners in this process. So they explained their project and their needs. We worked together to draft H5P exercises for their open textbook. I helped them import their content into Pressbooks. I made edits for design, accessibility and inclusion, and also worked with them on some of the content in the book where I understood a little bit of the content as a subject matter expert myself. And then they've relied heavily on me during the editing and refining phase of their project as well. So this one came together very well. It was an exciting experience. And the final project has been commended for its content presentation, but it was a lot more work than that first one.
And then we have the author that I would call "the unhurried." During their projects onboarding, again, we always start with that basic introduction to what we're doing, what's available, and how things work. They explained to me that they would need frequent check-ins. They completed their work on a chapter-by-chapter basis to accommodate a flexible schedule. And chapters are individually peer reviewed, copyedited and imported into our publishing platform. So bit by bit, they're getting things done as they need to, and I check in with them fairly regularly. In fact, weekly we have check-ins to ensure that I'm up to date on their project and they know what they have to do next. So every week, we meet for about 20 minutes to talk about where they are. At this point, it's been about two years and we have five chapters complete of the 13 we need to get things published.
So these are the three very different examples obviously of different ways that working with authors might go. You might have someone who is exactly what you expect to experience. They are the self-starter, they get going, they get done. It's all good. It might be a surprising experience where you get more out of it, but it also takes a little bit more out of you in the process, or it might be completely different from what you expected where it takes a lot more time and things don't quite go to plan. Now, there are pros and cons for each of these experiences. As I say here, the self-starter was low maintenance. But the things that they created at the end of the day were not creative. They were not particularly attractive. And until we did our reviews and came back and said, "Here are the things you need to fix", they were inaccessible because although I provided them with the resources for best practices to say, "Here are the things you need to meet", they didn't necessarily look over those or take them to heart.
The collaborator was really great to work with and they made a great OER, but it was a high maintenance experience. And because our relationship was set up at too informal of a level, they asked for support outside of working hours. And that made it a harder situation for me to deal with personally. And the unhurried, while they were reliable, they listened to my advice. I still like working with them. But because they changed their plans often and things need to be spaced out fairly well, project management can be difficult.
So this isn't an all or nothing things get better or worse down the line. It's just different ways that interfacing with authors can change. And this is because authors are not necessarily a monolith. They're all individuals. They're people. And the issues we faced did not necessarily stem from them or from me alone. There are problems that I could have headed off with the collaborator by setting better boundaries for myself and their expectations for me. And there are things happening for the unhurried or for the self-starter that I need to account for myself or that can't be accounted for, like health or personal issues.
So what can you learn from my mistakes? Or more specifically, what can you learn from the experiences that I've gone through here? Well, working with authors is all about respect for each other, as people and for you and your time. You need to respect that they have their own needs and expectations and they need to respect that you are an individual worthy of actually being seen as a collaborator and part of this process. You need to manage expectations for you and for them, so it's clear what parts of their production design and final publication process each of you is handling. You need to communicate enough. And this varies. Weekly works for me and the unhurried person on my list. But it does not have to be weekly. It could be monthly, it could be quarterly. Whatever makes sense for the project that you're working with.
And you need to develop shared goals for what the project will be. So what do you expect to get out of this and how can you make sure that you're meeting each other's goals? We're going to talk a little bit more through each of these things in a second. So questions to ask as you're working with authors and getting things started. First, what does the author want? And this is the big picture, the "If I could have this, this would be awesome." What is the purpose of their project, their desired end result, their timeline and their preferences for technology, art and licenses? So what does this need to be? What do they really want this to accomplish on a larger scale to support their students, to be the best introductory engineering book in the world? Do they want it to be a textbook? Do they want it to be modules? Do they want it to be something interactive and alternative?
What is their timeline? So do they want this to be a year long project or are they okay with it going longer? And then those other preferences, those are things that you'll need to dial in on, on just how much it's a preference versus a need for them, which goes into what can the author actually do? Because while they might want a lot of these things, what they're capable and able to put into their project will determine what you're able to finally do at the end of the day.
Their position might dictate this. If they're a full-time professor, then they might have more leeway in how they spend their time, than an adjunct that's working at three different institutions. Their teaching load will definitely play a role in this, whether they're teaching three courses this semester or excessive courses because there's a lack of instructors in their field, if they have funds available that they contribute to pay off some of their time, or if they have support from their department. I've worked with students in faculty where they have two or three TAs that do most of the work, and the faculty member just gives them notes on what to do next. And I've worked with some authors where they're doing this on the weekends and the time that they have available. It really differs depending on who you're working with as an individual. And setting up the expectations on a one-by-one basis can help you get an idea of what's possible for that project.
And then what can you do? So as you're thinking through a project and an author and getting things set up, you need to ask them and ask yourself, "What is it that you're going to do for their project?" Will you be managing the workflows? Flushing out the timelines, scheduling the check-ins? And generally, what you'll need to do is communicate those expectations upfront. Who does what and what can be delegated and what expectations are reasonable? So like I said a minute ago, what can the author do? There's a lot of different changes there.
And you might think, "Well, if it's an adjunct that only has time on the weekends and they really want to do this cool project and I really care about it, then I should contribute more of my time." But what expectations are reasonable for you, should really think about what expectations you're setting in place for the long haul as well. Because over time, this instructor, this author, is going to come to expect the same level of support or let other people know about how great it was working with you because you did certain things for them. And making it clear that you are making an exception or that you cannot do certain things upfront might be hard. But it'll be better in the long run to make sure that your expectations you're setting are the same for authors across the board.
So what can you not do? You need to be clear about the non-negotiables and what you're able to do and what you're not. So are there services you don't offer or projects that you won't take on? Can you support an author's platform preferences, like different things that are more technically minded, open source, or have specific requirements that you might not be an expert in? Do you not allow certain fonts or color choices? I had one author that really wanted ... I like this pink and purple across their book, and I had to say, "No, we cannot do that. That is not in our style guide. Here is our rules." And can you accommodate closed projects or ones with no derivatives licenses? Generally, it's best to think about what are your hard lines on things? What will you say no to? Because if you have some guidelines in place for that, it's easier to say no when it comes up later.
Some things like can the author leave out alt text and have you do it later? Really obvious, no. Things need to be accessible. We need you to do this work because it's best practices. Other things like fonts and color choices are a little bit harder to take a hard line stance on. So figuring out where you fall on each of these sorts of questions is an important part of this process. And remember, this is a team effort. So you are not the single sole person doing all of this work all the time. Even if you're supposedly like me, the main person doing OER work on your campus, the main person doing OER production support, there's still other people you can get in touch with to support authors as they're developing projects, like IT experts, instructional designers, librarians, accessibility support. Different people across campus who can be part of this process, even if they're not explicitly part of a press or a publishing program explicitly.
I especially like the note of instructional designers because since I first started working on some of these projects I outlined earlier, we have integrated our instructional design support into our program for publishing where from the very start, if they're working with an author or a faculty member who is redesigning their course and they think there's a lot of great content here, the author wants to repackage it into their course to be more modular, why don't we look and see if they're willing to make it in OER to share it out? And that collaboration across it has helped us also expand our publishing, in addition to getting more support for helping instructors as they're doing this work. So how do you onboard new authors?
First is obviously the planning meeting where you get started and think about how this is all is going to work. This might be a discussion about a bunch of different things like what is your OER going to be? How many chapters will it be? What format will it be in? What's the general process for working with us and working with them on getting their project up and running?
And is there anything that might be tricky about the project, like math, multiple languages, complex tables? And what expectations is there as a whole? So this is the from a hundred feet up, looking down, what does the project look like? And the planning meeting is really important because it helps you understand at the very beginning also how much of this work is already done. Sometimes, authors will come in and they already have a full first draft of something they've been working on for 10 years. And sometimes, they'll come in with a general idea of what they want to do someday. And the difference between these two is pretty stark. So knowing what you're getting into is an important part of whether you're willing to or able to take on a project.
Next, you can set those expectations for the workflows. In addition to what they have already, what they want to do and what your workflow looks like, you need to think about the platforms you're working with. Do you use Manifold, LibreTexts, Pressbooks, Word? Is there some specific format that you prefer people start their work in or finish their work in? Should they prepare a sample chapter for review or can they just get going and get done? And then think about who's responsible for different aspects of your work. For example, formatting, cover art design, accessibility reviews, copyediting, peer review. Are there different people that do all these things? Is it all you or someone else on your team? Good things to know about.
And remember, once again, setting these guidelines early on from what you can expect from authors and what they can expect from you, can prevent scope creep from setting in later. You do not want to all of a sudden find that you're expected to do all of these things because you did it once or twice. I would know. Next we have communication tips. So you've talked to authors, you've got an idea of their project, you've got an idea of where they're going to be putting things together and how it'll work. So how do you keep up to date with them as they're getting their work done? Well, first, you want to find out what sort of communication methods work best for you two as a group or all of you, if there's more than two of you. Email, phone, Zoom, in person, messenger apps, project management tools. Even Twitter or things like Slack and Discord have been used for different sorts of projects.
Generally, I say keep it to the same thing. You're with different authors, but with some authors you might be more or less formal with them. But figure out what works best for you. And set up regular check-ins. This might be monthly, bimonthly, quarterly. Again, whatever works best for you, to go over where their project is and what timeline changes might be necessary, because as people get to work on open textbooks specifically, but any sort of OER then they might find that plans change, life things happen, and accounting for that is good to know earlier rather than later.
And here I have a very important tip. So a lot of the times when I'm working with authors, we get to this point where we're talking regularly, we have a plan, they're drafting their content, they think they're ready to go. But they don't want to publish it yet. They don't think it's ready. It needs more time, it needs to be beefed up. There needs to be more in it, or it needs to have more contributors. Well, remember that OER can be an iterative process. OER development means it can grow and change and develop both at your own institution and as it's adapted and adopted by others. It's best to reinforce with authors that they can continue to build on their resources over time and that if they don't publish it now, if they don't publish it even when it's good enough and they're going to be using it in their course anyway, it's not doing anyone else any good.
It's not going to be able to be open and shared and useful for other people like it already is good enough for them. So remembering that can be pretty useful for those who might be hesitant to publish right now. So what's my new process? I've talked a little bit about my old process, which is whatever works. But my new process is first meeting with the authors about their project, their scope and timeline and needs, discussing the capabilities of our tools, things like how does Pressbooks work? You can add text boxes, videos, H5P, et cetera. We train authors on accessibility, formatting content and share the contact info for campus partners like our instructional design office and student accessibility services.
We have an import template and instructions for sharing image files so they know how to prepare content for import in Pressbooks from Word. And then they share their completed files with us, so we import it for them. That way expectations are set and we know that things are getting put in place how they need to be. Finally, authors will let us know if they want to do peer review, and reviews are completed with the Word files prior to import, if that's the best thing for that project.
So that's my old process. And what happens if things still go wrong? Because they do, things still do go wrong sometimes. You might run into communication author issues with authors or collaborators working with them. You might have schedule changes come up, like things just suddenly go wrong. Grant payouts might be stalled due to issues completely beyond your control. Personal emergencies, yours or theirs could come up. And there may be staffing changes like the person that you typically worked with in accessibility services accepts a job at MIT. And all of a sudden, you have no accessibility contact person on campus and have to figure that out. Not my personal experience, but things happen. So what do you do in these sorts of situations? You can't just say, "Oh, I'm sorry, I can't publish your book anymore", or, "It looks like things just won't work out."
You have to find some way around it to offer some comfort, support. Anything that might help things keep moving forward. So when you're navigating these roadblocks, it's best to first evaluate and edit your schedule as necessary. It's okay to make changes. It's okay to say, "There's a delay. We'll put that down and set new expectations." You can refer back to those earlier discussions you had about what the expectations were, what you were doing and what's expected of the author and you, so that you know, "Hey, we already talked about this. We knew what was going to happen if this couldn't be met. Well, changing that up, we're going to go back to those discussions and act accordingly."
You can reflect on what you can finish now or work on later. Like I said, OER can be iterative projects. If things look like it's going to be another year before we get the final chapter done of something, you can put out a 10 chapter book and say, "Chapter 11 coming next year." It happens. And it's best to think about what you can do later, next time this might come up, to avoid this happening again. Because sometimes, it's something that you can't account for, like someone breaks their leg. But other times it's things about your own university or systems that you get around for next time. And my final note here: Be flexible and understanding, because we cannot account for everything that might happen. Broken legs happen. And figuring out how that might affect your process, it doesn't need to be built into all of your workflows. But knowing that things change is an important part of all of this.
If you're encountering roadblocks like this and you feel like you can't get out of it, you don't know how to navigate around this problem, it's best to take a step back, determine who is stuck, first of all. Is it you or the author? Is it you just not being able to understand what you can do to get around this issue? Or the author who's saying they're unwilling to move with you in the right direction? Make sure that if you make a change, if you change the timeline or decide to publish with 10 instead of 11 chapters, the author agrees with you on that process. And if you do set a bad example early on, like me not setting quite enough boundaries between me and authors, you can enforce boundaries later on as a new workflow. You can say, "This is how things work now. We've made some changes to our process. This is what we've done."
So we've talked a little bit about my own personal experiences, things that you can do and things that you can do to get around issues as they arise. So how do we reflect and move on? If you run into a bad project or a project that just leaves a bad taste in your mouth, you should think about maybe set new standards and expectations for your work, taking a step back from publishing support for certain things, or maybe just refusing to work with that particular author in the future. You know the author in your circumstance. It's a different one from mine, but they happen. You can think about what makes the most sense for you. And it might be just that first point. It might be all three here. But making changes accordingly after something goes wrong, it happens. It's necessary.
In the end, you need to really balance those standards you want to set with the needs of your authors and the needs of you as a person and any team members you might have to support you. I love this note of your standards with their needs, their standards with your needs. What do they want and what can you offer, and what do you want versus what can they offer? Authors usually are not graphic designers. They cannot necessarily provide the most amazing beautiful things in the world. And either you have to accept that, or you have to find ways to support their needs and the ways that they can't do certain things themselves. You may need to alter your workflows to accommodate their needs and make sure things get done. And sometimes just saying, "You know what? This is good enough. We're going to push it out and it's going to be fine. And I will be okay with that", is also good enough, because really good content doesn't have to be beautiful content. And publishing is not all about making things that look really nice. Sometimes, being good and being useful is good enough.
The big thing that I really want to get across from this discussion about working with authors is not just there are some bad authors, there are some good authors. But the workflows that you set in place, the expectations that you set when working with people, are really what set you apart as someone who is able to do good work and feel good about it at the end of the day, and someone who is doing good work, but feeling a little bit burnt out at the end of the day.
So remember that you should take care of yourself as someone who is supporting OER publishing. You can say, "Not me", or just, "Not now. Maybe later." No one is entitled to your labor, especially if this is not your full-time job. I noted here it's not in my position description to support OER publishing. And you should leverage support that is available across your campus system or state. Especially, I know a lot of folks in Virginia, California, Oregon, Ohio, all across the US and outside of it, have a lot of support systems built into their local area that might be useful for publishing OER, or supporting them as you're getting this started. So now that I've talked way too much about myself, given some tips, given some ideas, let's talk about your own experiences and any questions you might have.
Amanda: Thank you so much, Abbey. We appreciate you sharing your experiences with today. And now we're going to switch into the Q&A. And you have a question that came in from Hailey. And it says, "With the timeline situation, I'm curious how one would balance the expectations of an MOU and stipend compensation, with a timeline that is not concrete, specifically thinking of the example of the unhurried author. I'd see how it would be beneficial for a range of faculty that do not have consistent time that can allot to an OER, but how would we compensate them for their time and count them for program justification? Thank you."
Abbey: Absolutely. So great example in part because the unhurried author has received funding and not completed their work yet. However, I think what's useful in this case is we did not have an MOU at that point. We do now for our grants. And it was a good example of why you also have MOUs. But to talk about the answer to yours, if you do run into a situation like this, how do you account for an MOU and stipend expectations, typically what I would say is you need to get to a point where something is a pilotable resource. So again, it's back to that it needs to be good enough to put out and to share. It needs to be good enough to count it as hitting the baseline for what you expect from a grant. And then after that, it can get through, "Now, we'll do the peer review. Now, we'll do the final edits. Now, we'll do the compilation."
And then it'll get to the part where the author really loves it and is happy with it, but you've already pushed it out and shared it with people so they can use it at their institutions. So in a way, having that MOU in place and having a harder deadline means that it's easier to make the case for, "Let's get to a good enough draft phase for now so we can share it. And then we'll do more of that finishing work, design, editing, formatting down the line."
Amanda: Follow-up question: "Would you consider releasing a resource chapter by chapter?"
Abbey: I would, depending on the resource. So this specific project, because we're editing it and putting it together chapter by chapter and copying it chapter by chapter, I have considered making it something where we put out the first 10 chapters as a completed book and then add a new chapter every couple of months. However, our digital press head has said, "That's not how book publishing works. Maybe we can not do that." So it'll be a discussion about ... Versioning gets harder that way because volume sizes get harder that way. And if we want to do print versions, again, that gets a little bit sticky. But it's an idea.
Amanda: Follow-up question. "Do you copyedit in-house or through third party?"
Abbey: Good questions.
Amanda: No, don't apologize for questions. We love questions here.
Abbey: Yeah, good, good questions. We do not copyedit in-house. We have a third party that we typically recommend if people have a grant that they go through. But for those that do not have grant funding and do not have any other means of getting copyediting support, I do go through resources and check the editing and general grammar and other things like that myself. And maybe that's something I should step back from as I am saying this out loud.
Amanda: Yay. You identified a boundary. Good job. Proud of you.
Abbey: One step at a time.
Amanda: Okay. I also have a question. Can you talk a little bit about your style guide and how you came to have a style guide, what's in your style guide, that kind of thing? And then we'll follow up with Natalia's question.
Abbey: Yes. So our style guide, typically we do not have a explicit everything has to be the citation style, everything has to be this sort of thing. It's more of the colors that we use in our text boxes. We have two separate versions, one for Iowa State colors for things that are university affiliated, like our accessibility toolkit, things from our office of no cheating. You know the office. Those guys.
Amanda: Excellent.
Abbey: Academic integrity.
Amanda: Integrity.
Abbey: So we use the ISU one for that, and then we use a separate set of colors for other textbooks. We also have requirements for which fonts we use in Pressbooks, both for the online and for the PDF versions. So people aren't using wacky fonts that have strange ways that they export. And then set standards for the width of pages, things like that. So it's not a you have to do certain, other style guides. It's not about the language or the style of the writing. It's more about consistency in how things look, because if for some authors for their field, they'll use APA, they'll use MLA, Chicago. And we don't want to change how that works for a biology professor.
Amanda: And then Natalia's question was: "Do you mind sharing who you recommend for copyediting?"
Abbey: I cannot. In part because we have a couple of different people. It's not like we recommend everyone goes through one group. We have one person that we've worked with before for the social sciences, and then we have another person that we've recommended for the hard sciences, and one person that we work with specifically for veterinary medicine.
Amanda: If you can't share names of people, can you talk maybe a little bit about how you identified those people?
Abbey: We ask for recommendations. In some cases, it helps that we have journals that are published through the digital press. So the journals have people that they typically work with and they can point us to. And in other cases, there are faculty or departments who have preferred folks.
Amanda: Thank you for sharing that link, Karen. Karen said that, "The OEN has a relationship with Scribe, which provides copyediting." Are there any more questions for Abbey?
Abbey: Since no one has asked yet, I am going to share a link to our template, which is really just an overview of formatting things for import into Pressbooks, which goes over things like if you have it set as a heading one, it'll start a new chapter. If you want to import specific formatting for tables, you can copy it from Word and it will come over in the import. But other things will not be imported using short codes, things like that. So it's a very short overview that might be useful for those of you that use that tool as well.
Amanda: Thank you. That is a very nice resource. If there aren't any more questions, I would like to remind you all that there is a survey that Karen linked in the chat and maybe she'll drop the link in the chat again. We would love to get your feedback about the Pub101 experience, this facilitated experience together, because we do use that feedback to iterate and make it better next time. So for example, we have taken Pub101 feedback on the curriculum and we have made revisions to the curriculum this time around. And now it's only I think three units instead of five. And we're thinking about future offerings, offerings that are more advanced, like maybe a Pub201 or 102 or something like that in the future. So your feedback is really useful. The committee will definitely discuss it and see what we can iterate.
All right, I don't see any more questions. So I'm going to go ahead and thank Abbey very much for sharing your time and expertise with us today. And then I want to thank you all for joining us as we learned about publishing and what OER publishing programs could look like together, and build a community of people who are interested in that topic. We hope that you will take the materials that you received through here through the program and use those, and that you will always remember that one of the key takeaways that we always emphasize is that you're not alone in this process.
There's a bunch of us who are trying to figure this all out again together. And so you have the class notes, which I will drop into the chat. If you have questions that you didn't get to ask or you are looking for information about what happened while you were here, you can always refer back to the class notes. But we want to thank you very much for your attendance and your generosity of spending time with us as we learned about this, for this series of Pub101.
END OF VIDEO
Chat Transcript
00:15:23 Amanda Larson: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1RVYw2ace_L42x8vxo0nGlJC6rHVvLDzYKeBR4RMdbi4/edit#heading=h.d89ulxay3q4x
00:16:36 Amanda Larson: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLWRE6ioG4vdYaAD97KKJiu-XZ08NpN6oq
00:17:08 Amanda Larson: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1YY66Fnp0iBhlZ9Rd8qOv3Av8u3rGNja1Cj5epO1YRyk/edit#heading=h.oymdzx9d30td
00:17:23 Amanda Larson: https://canvas.umn.edu/courses/377173
00:18:12 Karen Lauritsen: Reacted to "www.youtube.com/play..." with 👍
00:19:20 Karen Lauritsen: Hello and welcome! We hope that you will complete the Pub101 Survey. It will help the Pub101 Committee with future iterations: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScPctjWaG-G0fznvGE3oKUJZBF7EH83CWLm1Ab5U-PagPEC2g/viewform
00:42:29 Haley Norris: With the timeline situation, I am curious how one would balance the expectations of a MOU and stipend compensation with a timeline that is not concrete? Specifically thinking of the unhurried author. I see how it would be beneficial for a range of faculty that do not have consistent time that can allot to an OER but how would we compensate them for their time and count them for program justification? Thank you
00:45:06 Haley Norris: Would you consider releasing a resource chapter by chapter?
00:45:57 Haley Norris: Do you copyedit in house or through a third party?
00:46:05 Haley Norris: Sorry for all the questions
00:46:48 Natalia Bowdoin: Do you mind sharing who you recommend for copy editing?
00:48:38 Natalia Bowdoin: That makes sense!
00:48:52 Karen Lauritsen: Natalia, the OEN has a relationship with Scribe, which provides copyediting: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1jjOsDyP9vb3dFDxzEtSXm3FysvxFhYc391QXXBXSGqI/edit#heading=h.eyb7gidzj8oe
00:49:01 Natalia Bowdoin: Reacted to "Natalia, the OEN has..." with ❤️
00:49:13 Natalia Bowdoin: Thanks Abbey, and Karen too!
00:49:36 Abbey Elder: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1j2yQo7GGndSY3vjjXV9Sz0PpF_ByABfr/edit#
00:50:12 Karen Lauritsen: Reacted to "https://docs.google...." with 😃
00:50:26 Karen Lauritsen: Pub101 Survey (Please and Thank You!): https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScPctjWaG-G0fznvGE3oKUJZBF7EH83CWLm1Ab5U-PagPEC2g/viewform
00:50:54 Karen Lauritsen: We take your feedback to heart, for sure!
00:51:01 Natalia Bowdoin: Thanks Amanda, Abbey and the whole OEN team!! Very helpful!!
00:51:36 Sarah Hare: Thank you, OEN Pub101 facilitators!
00:51:40 Karen Lauritsen: Hope to see you all again!
00:51:55 Christy Wrenn: Thank you!!!
00:52:06 Amanda Larson: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1q_mvThSTMJfxSatX4XjwcDrjZf44_udVWtShkIhaF2g/edit#heading=h.esmv09kvuc5k
00:52:08 Abbey Elder: I am always happy to answer questions!
00:52:13 Natalia Bowdoin: Reacted to "I am always happy to..." with ❤️
00:52:21 Lisa Stepanovic: Thank you!
00:52:22 Tammy Palmier: Thank you!
00:52:24 Jamie Witman: Thanks Abbey and Amanda!!
00:52:25 Karen Lauritsen: Thanks everyone!
00:52:28 Cindy Gruwell: Thank you
00:52:30 Andrew Kearns: Thank you!
00:52:30 Karen Lauritsen: We heart questions.
00:52:33 Patricia Pierson: Thank you!
00:52:33 Isabelle Antes: Thank you!
00:16:36 Amanda Larson: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLWRE6ioG4vdYaAD97KKJiu-XZ08NpN6oq
00:17:08 Amanda Larson: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1YY66Fnp0iBhlZ9Rd8qOv3Av8u3rGNja1Cj5epO1YRyk/edit#heading=h.oymdzx9d30td
00:17:23 Amanda Larson: https://canvas.umn.edu/courses/377173
00:18:12 Karen Lauritsen: Reacted to "www.youtube.com/play..." with 👍
00:19:20 Karen Lauritsen: Hello and welcome! We hope that you will complete the Pub101 Survey. It will help the Pub101 Committee with future iterations: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScPctjWaG-G0fznvGE3oKUJZBF7EH83CWLm1Ab5U-PagPEC2g/viewform
00:42:29 Haley Norris: With the timeline situation, I am curious how one would balance the expectations of a MOU and stipend compensation with a timeline that is not concrete? Specifically thinking of the unhurried author. I see how it would be beneficial for a range of faculty that do not have consistent time that can allot to an OER but how would we compensate them for their time and count them for program justification? Thank you
00:45:06 Haley Norris: Would you consider releasing a resource chapter by chapter?
00:45:57 Haley Norris: Do you copyedit in house or through a third party?
00:46:05 Haley Norris: Sorry for all the questions
00:46:48 Natalia Bowdoin: Do you mind sharing who you recommend for copy editing?
00:48:38 Natalia Bowdoin: That makes sense!
00:48:52 Karen Lauritsen: Natalia, the OEN has a relationship with Scribe, which provides copyediting: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1jjOsDyP9vb3dFDxzEtSXm3FysvxFhYc391QXXBXSGqI/edit#heading=h.eyb7gidzj8oe
00:49:01 Natalia Bowdoin: Reacted to "Natalia, the OEN has..." with ❤️
00:49:13 Natalia Bowdoin: Thanks Abbey, and Karen too!
00:49:36 Abbey Elder: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1j2yQo7GGndSY3vjjXV9Sz0PpF_ByABfr/edit#
00:50:12 Karen Lauritsen: Reacted to "https://docs.google...." with 😃
00:50:26 Karen Lauritsen: Pub101 Survey (Please and Thank You!): https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScPctjWaG-G0fznvGE3oKUJZBF7EH83CWLm1Ab5U-PagPEC2g/viewform
00:50:54 Karen Lauritsen: We take your feedback to heart, for sure!
00:51:01 Natalia Bowdoin: Thanks Amanda, Abbey and the whole OEN team!! Very helpful!!
00:51:36 Sarah Hare: Thank you, OEN Pub101 facilitators!
00:51:40 Karen Lauritsen: Hope to see you all again!
00:51:55 Christy Wrenn: Thank you!!!
00:52:06 Amanda Larson: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1q_mvThSTMJfxSatX4XjwcDrjZf44_udVWtShkIhaF2g/edit#heading=h.esmv09kvuc5k
00:52:08 Abbey Elder: I am always happy to answer questions!
00:52:13 Natalia Bowdoin: Reacted to "I am always happy to..." with ❤️
00:52:21 Lisa Stepanovic: Thank you!
00:52:22 Tammy Palmier: Thank you!
00:52:24 Jamie Witman: Thanks Abbey and Amanda!!
00:52:25 Karen Lauritsen: Thanks everyone!
00:52:28 Cindy Gruwell: Thank you
00:52:30 Andrew Kearns: Thank you!
00:52:30 Karen Lauritsen: We heart questions.
00:52:33 Patricia Pierson: Thank you!
00:52:33 Isabelle Antes: Thank you!
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