4.1: Creating & Editing Content Summary
Congratulations! You’ve made it to the meat of the project – creating and editing content. Content in your OER should be consistent with the assessments your team designs, to prepare and support students through the assessment process, regardless of the type or format. This is also an important time to pay attention to considerations such as accessibility, inclusion, tone, reading level, and other structural elements, which together will improve the overall quality of your content.
Whether you’re starting a new OER or adapting an existing resource, this summary outlines the different processes of creating and editing content that help make your resource into a whole, cohesive resource that fulfills its intended learning objectives.
Always keep the audience front of mind. Authors should have a clear understanding of the resource’s eventual readers, why it is being created, what needs it fills, and how to keep the content culturally relevant, and accessible to make the resource work better for its readers. Ensure that your authors and editors keep accessibility, reading levels, and format in mind, so that everybody reading the OER can find value in it.
Get support from others. Create pathways for authors to work with and get input from instructional designers, potential adopters, and students, so the finished book is effective and valuable.
Model good practices. Use your author guide and model chapter to show authors how to incorporate accessibility, structure content in modules (for potential adapters), track glossary terms, properly tag key concepts, and enter citations.
Remember that creation can be iterative. Content can be expanded on, revised, and improved over time: the first release doesn’t need to include everything. Start with the core concepts, and then add case studies, media, quizzes, assignments, question banks, and slide decks. Editing and revisions will always expand to fill the time allotted to it. At a certain point, you need to stop and be satisfied with your content, rather than trying to make everything ‘perfect.’
Content creation is all about writing (and editing) for a student audience. We believe that collaborative approach to creating and editing content is key —it means multiple perspectives are embedded throughout the resource, which is ultimately better for readers.
Authoring teams should have multiple people collaborating, such as:
- Subject matter experts (including collaborators from outside your institution!)
- Instructional designers
- Curriculum developers
- Students
- Community members, senior experts, or industry professionals
When it comes to editing, it can take place at many points during the resource’s production, with different kinds of editors involved at each stage:
- Substantive editors are ideally subject-matter experts, and do a lot of work related to resolving questions and issues, and addressing areas of improvement (as identified by the developmental editor)
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