4.3: Considerations When Creating & Editing Content
4.3: Considerations When Creating & Editing Content
As we’ve said before, creating high-quality educational resources entails more than just writing accurate content. Creating and editing quality educational resources requires other skills and considerations that should be given some thought up front, to ensure that your content can be read with a critical eye, while also serving the broader needs of open and inclusive education. The following is not an exhaustive list, but should help prompt you as you’re entering and navigating the creation and editing phase.
Audience & reading level
The most important thing to keep in mind when creating content are the learners and instructors who will be using the book. Authors should have a clear sense of who the resource is for, why it is being created, what need it fills in the field, and how best to keep it culturally relevant. These details should be kept front of mind throughout the entire creation process to help shape and strengthen the text – for instance, through learning outcomes clearly presented at the start of each chapter or section, or examples in the book that ensure that all students will see themselves reflected or represented in the text.
We also recommend that editors keep in mind the reading level of the book’s audience, as well as the learning objectives that it is supposed to meet. There are a number of online tools that perform readability checks on content, such as Hemingway Editor, but we also recommend speaking to instructional designers and librarians at your institution for standards and resources best suited to your context.
The instructional design team can help you find the best ways to deliver content to students. This perspective should be included from early on to avoid the need for retroactive changes, and so that the end result is an effective and valuable teaching resource. With this information, authors and editors can understand how reading levels affect their context, and help the content fit the best standards for target readers.
Accessibility & inclusive design
In a similar vein, it’s important that you think of all learners when creating and editing your content, which means making sure it is released as an accessible resource that doesn’t require much, if any, remediation to meet the needs of the students using it. We believe very strongly in building accessibility into content from day one, not only in terms of technical accessibility, but also language and inclusive design[1]. It’s also worth remembering that designing for the margins is, well, just good design! It’s remarkable how many best practices for accessibility make the text better for everybody reading it (e.g. clear hierarchy & structure, captions on videos, etc.), as well as the obvious benefit of supporting students with recognised disabilities.
Editing is about making the text work better for its readers—this means everybody reading it, including not only students with recognized disabilities, but a