Creating Ancillaries & Editing

Textbook Success Program: Session 8

© Rebus Community. 2021. These slides are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.

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Agenda

• Interactivity to support student learning
• Ancillary materials to support adopters (and students!)
• Editing: types, timelines, and general considerations

Questions to Consider

1. For which topic areas would it be most beneficial to have more engagement and interactivity from your students?
2. What types of engagement would be best suited to help your students remember, understand, apply, and analyze the content covered?
3. What additional scaffolding may be helpful for adopters of your resource? Consider the materials that support teaching with the resource like syllabi, lesson plans, slide decks, learning activities, and assessments.
4. What is your workflow for the editing phase? What are the strategies you will use to ensure expectations are clear to all parties?
5. Who and how will you recruit editors for your project? Consider subject-matter experts, professional editors, and accessibility specialists.

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Why do we need interactive textbooks?

• OER as web-native resources:
• Leverage the tools on which OER are created
• Create engaging, interactive content and brings life to static exercises, activities
• Set your resource apart from other print and digital texts
• Meaningful ways to engage your students
• Build formative assessment into your OER to support students through your course
• Can be accessed on multiple devices, including mobile
• Digital/online teaching as a result of the pandemic has only furthered this need

What is H5P?

• H5P stands for HTML5 Package (HTML is HyperText Markup Language)
• “H5P is a plugin for existing publishing systems that enables the system to create interactive content like Interactive Videos, Presentations, Games, Quizzes and more.” - H5P website (Getting Started)
• Commonly used on the publishing platform Pressbooks, but can be embedded into any website, or even LMS
• Gaining popularity in OER/open education
• Nearly 50 different content types (nearly half of which are accessible)

Popular Content Types

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• Interactive Video: Videos enriched with interactions
• Course Presentation: Presentation with interactive slides
• Multiple Choice: Flexible multiple choice questions
• Quiz (Question Set): Sequence of various question types
• Fill in the Blanks: Task with missing words in a text
• Drag the Words: Text-based drag and drop tasks
• Column: Organize H5P content into a column layout
• Drag and Drop: Drag and drop tasks with images

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Bear in mind accessibility of content types, and the purpose or function of an activity in your book

interactivity by Vectors Market from the Noun Project

Choosing the right type

• Time vs. information required
• Learning outcome desired
• Accessibility of the content type
• H5P activities can vary from simple to complex
• Depends on the team and resources you have available

A map of H5P content by time and information needed to create it. From H5P presentation by Peg French. Licensed CC BY-SA.

OER Ancillary Materials

What are OER ancillary materials?

Accompanying or supplementary materials for teaching and learning. They may be integrated into a book or can be standalone.

Some examples:

• Course syllabus
• Unit/semester schedule
• Lecture slides
• Homework exercises
• Quizzes and test banks (with solutions for instructors)
• Workbooks or lab manuals
• Multimedia (images, videos, simulations)
• Lesson plans

Slide decks

• Most common type of ancillary resource
• Assist with teaching/instruction
• Used by students for reference
• Examples:
• Astronomy
• Blueprint for Success

Quizzes, homework, assessment

• Test banks and quizzes are important factors when assigning textbooks
• Ideal for courses that need consistent practice and reinforcement
• Examples:
• Nursing Skills
• Significant Statistics
• Open Music Theory

Course structure and scaffolding

• Course syllabus with thematic overview and approach
• Assessment types that are used to help students learn the textbook content
• Overview of the course structure and schedule - helpful for pacing reading assignments

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Editing

Purpose of Editing

• Makes content easier to read
• Provides structure, appeal, nuance
• Connects pieces as a whole cohesive text
• Chance to bring in new perspectives with text
• Improve the overall quality, readability, relevancy of the text
• Almost like another form of review

Types of Editing

1. Substantial Editing
1. Heavier lift involved
2. Focused on resolving problems
3. Increasing overall clarity of instruction
4. Reorganizing sections
5. Rewriting sentences

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2. Copy Editing & Proofreading

• Involves a very close reading of the text
• Looking for corrections to sentence-level errors: grammar, vocabulary, punctuation
• May include attention to consistent style choices

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When to edit?

• Substantial Editing
• Avoid revisions becoming an endless cycle
• Listen to the needs of your authors
• Build in cushion time to ensure revisions happen

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2. Copy Editing & Proofreading

• Sometimes occurs prior to peer review to ensure reviewers focus stays on the bigger picture
• Don’t stress about making it perfect

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Considerations for Editing

1. Establish clear workflows
2. Aim for accessible content
3. Editing isn’t just about critique

designer by Iconathon, US. In the Redefining Women Collection. In the Public Domain.

Attributions

This presentation includes materials that were adapted from the following resource:

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• Slide 7 includes an image created by Peg French from the H5P presentation originally published under a Creative Commons ShareAlike license at https://h5pstudio.ecampusontario.ca/content/309

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