Pre-Publication
16 Checklists
LynleyShimat Renée Lys; Open Textbook Network; Melissa Faldin; Karen Lauritsen; BCcampus Open Education; Amanda Coolidge; Sue Doner; Tara Robertson; Josie Gray; and Lauri Aesoph
Introduction: Checklists
This section offers checklists to help you check your progress as you work towards developing your open educational resource textbook.
Table of Contents
Checklist — Open Textbook Network, Melissa Falldin & Karen Lauritsen
Defining and Understanding Open Textbooks
1. Familiarize yourself with open licenses, if you haven’t already. Select which license you’d like to use, as it may impact what openly licensed material you can include in your work.
2. Learn where to find openly licensed material you can use. Librarians can help! You can also search Google by license. If you will be creating material (photos, for example) consider how to openly share those assets with others (like Flickr).
Institutional Considerations
3. Decide where you plan to share your completed open textbook and what those repositories, libraries and distributors may require.
4. Consider who may be able to offer help at your institution. Reach out to librarians and instructional designers, for example.
5. If working with others, take the time to meet and clarify expectations and roles. Draft and sign a contract or MOU.
6. Develop a timeline for textbook production. Include writing time as well as editing, proofreading and peer review time.
Textbook Organization
7. Develop a plan for your textbook’s design, including how you want to define the content and element structure. Each chapter needs to be consistent with the next so that students know what to expect.
Authoring Framework
8. Decide which style guide you’d like to use for your textbook and use it as a reference.
9. Commit to making your textbook accessible for a range of students.
10. Make a plan for how you’re going to handle updates and revisions so that your textbook stays up-to-date.
11. Create a list of peers who are willing to review your textbook and offer constructive feedback.
Community & Tools
12. Find a community who can support your work. Decide which tool or tools may be helpful for writing your textbook. This may differ depending on whether you’re writing solo or with others.
13. Survey which publishing tools look like a good fit for your textbook. Consider their capabilities related to your planned textbook content and elements.
14. Jump in!
Long Term
15. Share lessons from your experience with your colleagues in updates of this guide. (Thank you!)
Checklist for Accessibility — BC Campus Accessibility Toolkit – 2nd Edition, Amanda Coolidge, Sue Doner, Tara Robertson, and Josie Gray
Organizing content
- ☐ Content is organized under headings and subheadings.
- ☐ Headings and subheadings are used sequentially (e.g., Heading 1, Heading 2).
Images
- ☐ Images that convey information include alternative text (alt text) descriptions of the image’s content or function.
- ☐ Graphs, charts, and maps also include contextual or supporting details in the text surrounding the image.
- ☐ Images do not rely on color to convey information.
- ☐ Images that are purely decorative do not have alt-tag descriptions. (Descriptive text is unnecessary if the image doesn’t convey contextual content information).
Links
- ☐ The link is meaningful in context and does not use generic text such as “click here” or “read more.”
- ☐ Links do not open in new windows or tabs.
- ☐ If a link must open in a new window or tab, a textual reference is included in the link information (e.g., [NewTab]).
Tables
- ☐ Tables include row and column headers.
- ☐ Row and column headers have the correct scope assigned.
- ☐ Tables include a caption.
- ☐ Tables do not have merged or split cells.
- ☐ Tables have adequate cell padding.
Multimedia
- ☐ A transcript is available for each multimedia resource including relevant non-speech content.
- Transcript includes:
- speaker’s name
- all speech content
- relevant descriptions of speech
- descriptions of relevant non-speech audio
- headings and subheadings
- Transcript includes:
- ☐ Captions of all speech content and relevant non-speech content are included in the multimedia resource; this includes the audio synchronized with a video presentation.
- ☐ Audio descriptions of contextual visuals (e.g., graphs, charts) are included in the multimedia resource.
Formulas
- ☐ Formulas have been created using MathML.
- ☐ Formulas are images with alternative text descriptions if MathML is not an option.
Font size
- ☐ Font size is 12 point or higher for body text.
- ☐ Font size is 9 point for footnotes or endnotes.
- ☐ Font size can be zoomed to 200%.
BC Campus Checklists — Lauri M. Aesoph
Here are checklists for each phase of a textbook-creation project. These can be used to conduct a gap analysis and to manage the project.