What does an open textbook project look like?
A typical creation (or complex adaptation) project normally involves content authoring and content publishing elements and can be further broken down into five phases:
- Priming: environmental scan to determine nature of the project/consultations
- Pre-production: project planning and documentation, collaboration opportunities, sprint planning (if using)
- Design: development of outline, selection of a style guide, learning objectives, etc.
- Development: writing and editing, finalizing draft, copyediting, technical fixes, accessibility, etc.
- Publishing: making content available, incorporating into curriculum, sharing with colleagues, and maybe printing your own hard copies
What resources are usually needed to create a book?
- Technology: access to authoring tools and publishing platform
- Collaborators: co-authors / co-editors depending on the project, experts who could provide advice in areas of editing and proofreading, copyright, instructional design, technology options etc.
- Time commitment: writing a brand new textbook, reworking an existing manuscript or adapting another open textbook will require varying time commitment. On average it can take anywhere from 9 months to 18 months to produce an open textbook, depending on the complexity of the project.
- A budget: depending on access to resources, an author might require access to funding to produce a quality publication.
Attribution:
This section was adapted from Starting in the Open Textbook Toolkit by University of Toronto Online Learning, licensed for reuse under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License