Documentation:Open Textbook Publishing Guide/Building Teams

Building an Effective Team

When starting an open textbook project it's important to know all the roles involved the process. A team that includes not just subject matter experts can make certain that the resource has a practical value in classrooms and to students. Additionally, a team around your textbook ensures that you have:

people to help share the workload
different perspectives, experiences, and varying areas of subject expertise and knowledge that feed into the creation of the book
the option to draw on others’ time, skills, and expertise as the need arises
built-in networking and marketing for the book
a pool of potential adopters

Define What You Need

The first step to engage in developing an effective team is to think about and write out the details of what you need to be successful. You might be looking for chapter authors, peer reviewers, or editors. A role or job description can help you clearly lay out their specific duties. List out the various tasks, expectations, and/or responsibilities of the new contributor.

Decide Who You Need

Once you have a sense of the various tasks that a contributor would need to complete, you can decide on any critical requirements or criteria potential contributors should fulfill. This is a way of ensuring that you find the right person (or people) for the job, and you can be as broad or specific as needed.

Decide If What You Need Must be Budgeted

There are a number of supports available to you when developing an open educational resource at UBC. However, some roles may require expertise outside of the scope of your work or the freely available supports of UBC. For example, copy editing and graphic design are unique skill sets that may require funding. For information about funding opportunities at UBC for open educational resource development, go to the Open Educational Resources Fund.

UBC in-kind supports for open educational resource development include:

Finding

UBC Library provides support for finding open educational resources to reuse, revise, or remix, for your needs. For support in finding open educational resource, fill out this form.

Creating and Formatting

The Centre for Teaching and Learning Technology and UBC Library offer support for designing and formatting your open textbook using Pressbooks. This service includes:

Textbook design and style
Learning design to support textbook content, structure, timing, pedagogical strategies, learning activities, and assessment
Organizing and inputting textual content in Pressbooks
Formatting additional elements (e.g. images, text boxes, and exercises using H5P)
Collating metadata and developing formats

For support in creating and formatting your open educational resource, fill out this form.

Instructional Design

The Centre for Teaching and Learning Technology offers instructional design support for open textbooks. Contact Lucas Wright, Senior Educational Consultant.

Sharing

UBC Library provides support for sharing your open education resources through a variety of means, including open education repositories. For support in sharing your open educational resource, fill out this form.

Team Roles and Responsibilities

To better understand the roles you may need to develop your resource it may be helpful to breakdown these roles by their duties and the types of things that they will need to do for the project. Rather than focusing on specific job titles or roles, focus on sharing out the types of tasks that are needed. You will most likely find that people are doing a mix of activities from all areas.

The following guide provides you with an outline of the kinds of duties needed in the development of a team.

Administrative

Administrative duties involve communication, coordination, documentation and other tasks related to content creation but not actually creating content themselves.

Communication

Coordinating team calls, managing team communication and keeping the whole team up-to-date as things progress
Coordinating recruitment and calls for contributors
Being the first point of contact for the project
Creating a welcoming, supportive environment for all members of the team
Liaising with authors, conducting check-ins, and sending reminders with them

Coordination

Creating and managing timelines and schedules
Keeping track of everything on the project to ensure that the resource is on its way to completion and that everyone is on track with their tasks, including sharing supporting documents, answering questions and sending reminders
Identifying gaps or problems in the process, and ensuring these get resolved
Collecting and collating student and instructor feedback
Managing deadlines, etc. for reviewers and beta testers, making sure peer review and beta testing is successfully completed
Recruiting authors, beta testers, reviewers and reviewing applications

Documentation

Helping shape processes around content (including creating guides and templates)
Preparing a review guide and other preparatory documents such as tracking sheets, calls for reviewers, etc.and providing access to those documents as well as tools and feedback mechanisms
Crafting outlines, guides, templates and deciding what content is covered, along with the lead editor
Managing project-related documents and tools

Advisory/Oversight

Advisors are not directly involved in the producing the book or resource, but are involved at a high level and offer advice or input as needed.

Working to build best practices into working documents, chapter templates and, ultimately, the final content
Answering (or finding answers to) questions about accessibility from authors and others working on the text
Provide input on the project’s definition and direction, shape content at a high level, set broad strategic objectives for the resource
Make sure goals are met
Mediate conflict if/as it arises, act as an impartial body and advise the admin team on decisions
Ensure the team includes diverse perspectives, which are also represented in the content created

Content Creation

The responsibilities of a content creator will vary depending on your specific project.

Preparing an accessibility statement for the final text, surfacing the work done and any known issues
Writing and editing content, writing with best practices around accessibility and inclusive design in mind
Creating images, graphics, or videos to be included in the book, and designing with accessibility in mind
Chapter proposals, ancillaries (e.g. quiz banks, etc.), glossaries, bibliographies, or other materials for their chapters
Checking permissions for any media elements used, creating a clear and accurate list of permissions, licenses, and attributions in the final text (note: we discourage relying too heavily on one-off permissions, so as to avoid complications for downstream users adapting your text)
Designing the book cover (and/or resource landing page), creating promotional materials (such as email signatures, infographics, visuals for social media, etc.)

Formatting/Structure

Design

Answering questions from authors, editors, and formatters, making judgement calls when necessary
Preparing a sensible chapter structure, working in tandem with instructional designers or lead editors, making sure text fits needs of target course(s)
Writing chapter outlines and ensuring as best they can that the chapter fits within the larger text
Identifying areas where content is unclear for a subject matter expert to revise
Conducting a simple pass over content for accessibility, both when formatting content and also in the resource’s final file formats
Confirming learning objectives for resource and ensuring that these learning objectives are served by the content

Formatting

Creating model chapters, following and implementing the style sheet for the project
Collecting “finished” content (generally finished means reviewed, edited and proofread)
Inputting content in book formatting software such as Pressbooks, including images, text boxes, and exercises using H5P, etc.
Standardizing formatting across chapters (headings, text boxes, learning outcomes, images, tables, etc.)
Exporting the text in various file formats and conducting a visual check
Inputting and collating metadata

Review

Reviewers can range from copy editors to peer reviewers, and the experience and knowledge needed will vary.

Conducting an intensive start to finish edit of text as a whole (focusing less on grammar and punctuation and more on cohesion, structure, and working with the content available)
Find and fix spelling, grammar, and punctuation
Conducting an accessibility review on final file formats
Making recommendations for further improvements
Conducting a ‘trial run’ of a text in a classroom setting
Promoting, if they are satisfied with the quality of the resource and see value in it, or adopting the book if they would like to do so