Planning for Success in the Collaborative Creation of Open Educational Resources (OER): The Case of Diverse Russian

By Shannon Donnally Quinn, Michigan State University, and Anna Tumarkin, University of Wisconsin-Madison

DOI: https://www.doi.org/10.69732/WMVF7469

Recently, we completed an Open Educational Resource  project called Diverse Russian: A Multicultural Exploration. Open Educational Resources (OER) are learning materials that are freely available to learners, and, in most cases, are allowed to be shared, modified, and repurposed. Many of them use Creative Commons licenses so that the rights given by their creators are clear to their users. 

Diverse Russian is a free, online, interactive Russian language textbook that invites students to use the Russian language to explore places that have Russian-speaking communities. It is intended for students who are approaching or are at the Intermediate level, and could be used to supplement existing Intermediate-level textbooks or as a main textbook in a listening, reading, and conversation course. The places that are explored in the OER include: Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Indigenous populations of Russia, the Baltics, Georgia (Sakartvelo), and the United States.

After finishing the project, we thought we could share some lessons learned about the process of collaboratively creating an OER that might benefit people who are undertaking similar projects in the future. Some of these insights may also be relevant to other kinds of projects as well.

Choose the Right Partner, the Right Time, the Right Project

The first and most important decision for a project like this is that you should choose your partner wisely! We feel very lucky that we work so well together and our strengths complement each other. We also felt that we waited for the right time and the right project. We had wanted to work together for a long time, but things did not line up until this project came along and fit what we both wanted to do. Creating an OER or other similar materials takes a lot of time, and so it is very important that it be enjoyable for those involved.

If you don’t already have a co-author identified, remember that it’s important to find someone who understands the value of Open Educational Resources. Some institutions may not give credit towards tenure or promotion for the creation of OER, so anyone that you might potentially work with will need to consider its potential impact on their career. And some people are not comfortable with the open model of publishing, so a discussion about whether your goals align is important to have before you begin working on the project.

Here are some key steps to help you find the right partner:

1. Clarify Your Vision and Goals

• What is the scope of your textbook? (Level, focus, methodology)
• Who is the target audience? (Learners, teachers, heritage speakers, etc.)
• What are the key features or innovations you want to include?
• Are you comfortable with publishing something with an open license?

2. Identify Ideal Qualities in a Co-Author

• Expertise: Someone with knowledge in the target language, pedagogy, and curriculum design.
• Complementary Skills: If you excel in instructional design but struggle with technical aspects (e.g., digital platforms, corpus linguistics), find a partner with those strengths.
• Collaboration Style: Do they work well in teams? Are they responsive and organized?
• Commitment: Textbooks are long-term projects—your co-author needs to be equally invested.
• Approach: A person who understands your pedagogical approach and shares a similar philosophy.

3. Test Compatibility with a Small Project

• Before committing to a full textbook, consider co-writing a short article, a lesson plan, or a module.
• See how well you communicate, handle revisions, and meet deadlines.

4. Discuss Roles, Expectations, and Responsibilities

• Decide on a division of labor (Who writes what? Who edits? Who manages funding or publishing logistics?).
• Outline expectations for deadlines, feedback, and workload.
• Agree on authorship credit.

Communication

Decide near the beginning of your project what the best way for you to communicate will be. In our case, we had weekly meetings that we could cancel from week to week if they were not needed (but most of the time we needed them!). These meetings helped us to be accountable to each other for our self-imposed deadlines and break up our larger tasks into smaller, manageable tasks that we could help each other to complete. We also established a chat platform that we could use if we had small questions between our regular meetings. You might consider creating a specific channel for your project in a chat platform that includes only communications about your project so that there is an easily searchable record related to the project. It also really helps to not have to wade through emails on other topics. For authors in very different time zones, the bulk of the communication might happen asynchronously. We used Microsoft Teams for our communication because both of our institutions already used this platform, but authors may want to consider other platforms like Slack or Asana. Some have project management features that could be useful in organizing a large project like an OER.

Work Backwards

If your project has a due date (or even if it doesn’t), it’s a good idea to plan backwards from that deadline. If your project needs to be completed by September 1, for example, what are interim due dates for various aspects of the project that will help you to achieve your goals? Think about the various milestones that need to be reached for the project to be completed and what a reasonable timeline for each of those would be. Plan for a final review and refinement period close to the end date to catch any last details and ensure the quality, and cohesiveness of the final product. And be sure to schedule in extra time, because projects like these always take longer than we think they will, and problems interfere in ways that are difficult to foresee.

The Proposal

If possible, it helps to get some funding for your project. Requirements for proposals can obviously differ depending on the funding source. OER projects are getting much easier to execute even on a shoestring, but there are tradeoffs. If you need training on some aspects of the development process, you will need to factor in extra time (and possibly money) for that.

If you are applying for funding for your project, these are some of the expenses that you might consider including:

• Money to fund course releases for the authors or for overload pay
• Student hourly help
• A platform if your institution does not have one
• Access to training if you need it
• A domain name or web hosting
• Help with graphic design
• Help with proofreading or editing
• A subscription to stock photo sites
• Equipment or software that might be needed, such as a microphone or video/image editing software
• Money to hire people to record for your project
• Funding to attend conferences and present about the project
• Advertising
• Funding for research related to the project

It’s not always easy to find funding sources for creating OER, but your institution or library may have small grants available for this purpose, or you might want to check with the Title VI Language Resource Centers or other professional organizations. If you think you might want to create an OER in the future, keep your eye out for possibilities. Ask leaders in your field for their suggestions, and be creative. With the help of our department chairs, directors of our programs, and financial officers, we were able to repurpose some of our professional development money to fund chapters in our book.

The Platform

You and your partner will have to decide what platform you will use to publish your OER. For us, it was an easy decision, since both of our institutions had a subscription to Pressbooks with H5P. Investigate the options at your institutions, and if there is not one clear cut choice, remember to factor some time into your schedule for trying out various options. Some other platforms that could be considered are LibreTexts, Manifold, and OER Commons Open Author, but OER can also be hosted in many places, including Learning Management Systems (LMS) or other types of websites such as WordPress.

Divide Up Ownership – Feedback

We felt that it would work best if we gave each person responsibility and final say over certain aspects of the project. Our project was to have six chapters, and so each of us claimed responsibility for three. There were times, of course, when we helped each other with various aspects of “our” chapters, but it helped us to define beforehand who would be “in charge” of each topic. That person then also made any final decisions for that chapter – with, of course, the advice of the other partner. This clear division of responsibility helps to ensure accountability and efficiency, both of which are crucial for a successful collaboration.

You may want to consider whether you will plan out your OER’s content before putting it into the OER authoring tool. Do you want to use Google docs or another collaborative tool to create storyboards or lesson plans beforehand, or will you just do your creative work directly in your OER tool? The answer will depend on personal preferences, the affordances of the tools available, and individual circumstances, and each approach has pros and cons. Since Google docs include features that allow easy collaboration like comments and suggestions, giving feedback on content is probably easier, but sometimes time can be saved if you can see how activities work immediately within the final interface. Another advantage of starting with content in a Google doc is that a copy can be saved for backup purposes as well.

On a related note, decide how you will give feedback to each other. We found that making a simple table in a Google doc, with the name of the page on the left and space for feedback on the right was a good way of leaving feedback for each other. We also found, though, that it was useful to have a conversation in advance about how to handle revisions. If one person saw a simple typo, for example, should that person just fix the typo without noting it in the feedback document? What kinds of revisions did we feel comfortable doing for each other, and which kinds needed a conversation?

Getting into the Weeds

Some of the questions in the following section may seem like small details, but agreeing on these things in advance can potentially save you a good deal of time. 

Structure and Organization

• Audience:

  • Will the users of your book be mostly students who are part of a class, or independent learners?
  • Will the textbook be used largely as homework assignments, or will some parts of the book be used during a synchronous class?
  • Will the users of the book be traditional learners, heritage learners, or a mixture of both?
  • How will you balance the needs of the various types of learners that may use your materials?

• License: 

  • What rights are you comfortable with giving to the users of your OER? 
  • If you will be giving your work a Creative Commons license, which one will you choose?

• Introductory Materials:

  • Will you include some kind of introductory materials for students or teachers that will be using your OER? What should be included, and how will you direct your users to it?
  • Some possible introductory materials could be: structural information about the book, how to navigate the book, technical information, what resources the book offers and how to locate them, and information about accessibility and copyright.

• Chapter Layout:

  • How many chapters will the OER include, and what will be the primary focus or theme of each chapter?
  • Will chapters follow a logical sequence, building on previously introduced material, or will they be modular, allowing instructors to select and use them independently based on course needs?

• Learning Flow:

  • Will preparatory or introductory activities be needed for students to engage effectively with the content? If so, how will these be structured (e.g., warm-up activities, pre-reading tasks, vocabulary previews), and what tools will be used to create them?
  • Are there follow-up or reflective activities planned to help consolidate learning after each chapter?

• Chapter Consistency:

  • Will each chapter include standard sections such as objectives, key themes, vocabulary, cultural notes, main activities, and assessments?
  • Are there specific design elements (e.g., icons, color coding) that will provide consistency across chapters and help students easily navigate the material? Some platforms include templates for these types of elements, or you might consider designing some that can be reused in the different parts of your OER.

• Modularity and Integration:

  • Can chapters be mixed and matched, allowing instructors to customize the content sequence to fit their course goals, or is a specific order recommended?
  • Will there be cross-references to content in other chapters to support integrated learning and help students make connections across topics?

• Scaffolding and Support:

  • Will each chapter offer support tools, such as vocabulary lists, grammar explanations, or cultural notes, to scaffold challenging materials?
  • Are there additional support resources (e.g., videos, exercises, practice quizzes) to reinforce key concepts and assist students with self-study? What tools will be used to create them?

• Assessment and Feedback:

  • Will each chapter include formative assessments to provide feedback on students’ progress?
  • Are there summative assessments (e.g., chapter-end quizzes or projects) that allow students to demonstrate mastery of the content?
  • Will assessment materials be publicly available, or will there be a system in place to verify that someone is an instructor before granting access?

• Student Engagement:

  • How will each chapter encourage active engagement and interaction, such as through collaborative activities, discussion prompts, or real-world application tasks?
  • Will there be opportunities for students to reflect on or personalize their learning experience within each chapter?

Instructions and Labeling

• Are instructions going to be in L1, L2, or both? Will this be standardized for the whole book, or may there be exceptions based on particular goals of a certain activity? If the materials of your book are meant to be sequential, the instructions could follow a progression into the L2.
• Will you create a standard set of instructions that will repeat when similar activity types are used?
• How will you label activities?
• How will you number questions?

Vocabulary and Glossaries

• Will your OER include vocabulary lists?
• Where will the vocabulary lists go (beginning of chapter, end of chapter)?
• Will vocabulary be listed in the order it occurs, in alphabetical order, or will it be grouped in some other way?
• What should be included in the vocabulary list? What baseline of vocabulary will you assume for your students?
• Will vocabulary be listed in the “dictionary form”, or in the form it is in in a particular text?
• Will you want to include multimedia elements for your vocabulary lists like audio files or images? What tool can accommodate these, and where will you get the audio or images?
• Will you provide flashcards or other ways for your students to use to practice the vocabulary? What tool will you use for that?
• If texts have a glossary, where will the glossary be located?
• How will you address linguistic variety? Will the textbook focus on a single standard variety (e.g., St. Petersburg Russian, Parisian French) or multiple varieties (e.g., Russian in Kazakhstan, Swiss French)? What strategies will you use to help learners navigate these differences?
• How will you accommodate the needs of various types of learners in your presentation of vocabulary? For example, would the placement or selection of vocabulary differ if your students are traditional vs. heritage learners?

Texts and Multimedia

• What are you comfortable with from the point of view of the authenticity of the materials that you will use in your materials? Do they have to be 100% authentic, or can they be created or adapted?
• How comfortable are you with using multimedia that you get from other sources? Will you use only works that are in the public domain or have a Creative Commons license? Or will you consider using copyrighted media, relying on fair use?
• How will you cite texts and multimedia that you use in your materials?
• If you need custom images or graphics, or audio or video editing for your materials, who will be able to do it? Do you have the skills to do it, the time to learn, or would it work better for you to hire someone to do some of these parts of the job for you?
• Are you comfortable using AI-generated texts, images, or multimedia? Are there specific guidelines or limitations you would like to set when incorporating AI-created materials to maintain accuracy, quality, and reliability? If you do use AI, how will you acknowledge that in your work? You may want to consider developing a template to follow so that this information is consistent in your OER.

Tools like Canva can help greatly with designing graphics, and it has a month-long free trial that you might be able to strategically use if you need some images (or some institutions have provided access to it, and it is free for K-12 teachers). Check out this article about finding and creating visuals for more tips on creating visuals for educational purposes. For information about copyright, Creative Commons, and understanding what can fall under fair use, go through this interactive slideshow about navigating copyright and consult the Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Open Educational Resources.

Wikimedia, Flickr, and stock image sites like Pixabay, Pexels, Openverse, and Unsplash have made it much easier to find stock images (but even audio and video now as well) or Creative Commons media, and we recommend using these wherever possible. But fair use often applies for these types of projects, so learn about what it allows as part of preparing yourself for creating educational materials.

We recommend writing something in the “about” section of your materials about the fact that you have tried your best to acknowledge and properly cite any materials, and give contact information so that you can be contacted if anything needs to be corrected or removed.

Interactive Activities

• Should questions be in L1, L2, or either depending on the context?
• If your platform allows you to provide “hints”, how many of these should there be, and how should they be structured? Should they be in L1 or L2?
• How much and what types of feedback should be included in interactive activities?
• Since many computer-based activities are not able to provide feedback on subjective types of interactive activities or personalized assignments, how will those kinds of activities be included in your OER?
• Does your platform allow the tracking of student activity with the materials? How does this work? If it does not, do you have suggestions for teachers about how to hold their students accountable for the work that they do with the OER?

It is worth spending enough time to get some norms established before you start working and while you are working on the first unit of your OER. This can potentially save a lot of time later because if you make decisions on the fly, you will inevitably end up having to backtrack to standardize your materials later. We also recommend making a document in which you make note of the decisions that you make about formatting and other technical aspects of your OER for easy reference at later stages of the process of creating your OER.

Accessibility

• What measures will you undertake to make sure that your materials are as accessible as possible? One resource for this is BCcampus’s Accessibility Toolkit.
• Do you need to undergo training to learn more about accessibility standards?
• How will you balance accessibility with the integrity of the activities themselves?

Supplementary Materials

• What kind of supplementary materials will you provide for teachers?
• Do you feel that these supplementary materials should be inaccessible to students, or will they be a part of the same platform? If you decide to make them inaccessible to students, what platform will you use for instructor access? Additionally, will instructors have permission to modify these materials as needed?
• Some possible types of supplementary materials could be: vocabulary lists, transcripts of video or audio, a teacher’s manual, printable texts, slides for classroom use, assessments

Piloting and Evaluating

If you can, decide beforehand how you will pilot the materials with some real-life students. Schedule time into the project timeline to try out the OER with your students and get feedback from them with time to revise according to what you learn. Think about what you will want to ask students and how to get the most useful feedback from them. Since we were only using the results for our own purposes, we ended up just asking our students 5 open-ended questions: 

1. Did you have any technical or logistical difficulties with the lessons about Kazakhstan?
2. Did you have any technical or logistical difficulties with the lessons about Georgia?
3. What parts of the lessons did you find the most interesting or helpful?
4. What activities did you find the most challenging? 
5. Do you have any suggestions for what might make your work with these lessons easier or more interesting?

You may also want to include questions about engagement, accessibility, and the clarity of instructions or activities.

If you want to publish research based on some of your findings, you may need to ask a more extensive set of questions, and of course remember that in that case you would need to get permission from your Institutional Review Board (IRB). 

Similarly, try to get some colleagues to try out and give feedback on the materials before you release them. In our case, we hired a consultant for each chapter who was either from that region or lived there. This person helped us to identify important topics relevant to each location and avoid pitfalls that we could have missed. We also allocated funds in our budget for an honorarium for an outside reviewer. Be sure to leave enough time in your project’s schedule to allow several weeks for the reviewer to evaluate the materials and then enough time to make revisions.

Backup, Dissemination, Maintenance

Backup

As you work on your project, it’s important to think about what parts of your work you will want to keep backups of, and where. In our case, we periodically backed up both the Pressbooks part of our project and the H5P files. We also, though, have a Google folder that has all of the various puzzle pieces of our project, like Google docs of the texts and backups of the images, so that if, at some point, we have to move the materials to another platform, we would be able to reconstruct it. Hopefully we will not have to, but nothing is permanent in educational technology! For some more thoughts about how to make projects salvageable and sustainable, read this article about the RAILS project.

Dissemination

Think about how you will get the word out about your OER once it is completed. We presented about ours even before it was finished so that our colleagues would know that it was forthcoming, and we have presented about it several times after its completion in various conferences. Professional listservs and social media can be very effective in getting the word out about new resources and can help those outside of the language teaching profession to discover the OER. You may also want to share your experience in creating it with the colleagues at your institution or in your field. As you are working, keep track of the lessons that you learned and then write something about it in The FLTMAG or in a newsletter in your state teacher’s organization, for example. Or maybe you want to do some action research about how your materials benefit your students. Presenting about these findings will also keep your colleagues informed about how they could utilize your work. The Language OER conference is a conference that happens in the spring, and sharing your work there will allow you to inform colleagues about it as well as learning from others who have also created Open Educational Resources. You can also consider sharing your work at the Open Education Conference, ACTFL, or at other conferences specific to the language that you teach.

Another effective way to introduce your OER to potential users is by holding a dedicated webinar. The webinar would allow you to walk interested colleagues through the OER’s structure, navigation, and the pedagogical philosophy behind it, giving them a hands-on preview of what it offers. During the webinar, you could highlight key materials and supplementary resources, demonstrating how they can be integrated into the overall curriculum and support diverse learning objectives. A webinar provides an interactive space for colleagues to ask questions, explore specific features, and gain a deeper understanding of how the OER could benefit their teaching. Recording the webinar and making it available afterwards would also enable those unable to attend to engage with the resource at their convenience.

You can also get the word out about your resource on OER repository sites and promote it on OER listservs. MERLOT (Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching) and OER Commons are two such sites.

Maintenance

Many projects do not make a lot of plans for what will happen to the resource once it has been created, but the longevity of your project is important! You may want to set up a special email address that gets posted on your site so that users can get in touch if something goes wrong in the book or if anything needs to be tweaked. 

Decide with your collaborators about a maintenance plan. Once a year or every six months, have someone comb through the materials to check on any broken links or unavailable videos. Decide how you will deal with these cases.

Sometimes problems need to be dealt with immediately, so we have created a Google form that is embedded on the “For teachers” page that allows users to easily report any difficulties they encounter. The Google form is set to send a notification email to us if anything is submitted to it.

Revisions and Expansion

One nice thing about “publishing” an OER is that you do not have to wait for a publisher or for “the market” to allow a new edition. Revisions can continue to be made. Be aware, though, of course, that if many other people are using your materials, they will want to be able to always be familiar with what is on the website. If you plan to make any substantial revisions to existing material, you may want to wait until the summer to do so, and inform colleagues in your field that changes have been made. Consider creating a “Changelog” page on your OER to document updates so that users can consult it if necessary.

We hope to continue to expand our OER by adding on chapters, which would not be disruptive to those who are still using the existing chapters.

Community of Practice

Our OER is still new, but we hope that those who are using it will help us to create a community of practice around it. As people create supplementary materials, we hope they will share them with others by using our open Google folders. After the first academic year after our OER was released, we hope to organize some roundtables at conferences in which users can talk about how they are using the resource and how we can continue to foster a community of practice around it. The analytics of our website can give us an idea of who is using the textbook, and we hope to reach out to those institutions to try to facilitate the sharing of materials used in conjunction with our book.

One thing that we did not think of that you may want to consider is to collect the names and email addresses of those that showed interest in your OER so that you have a mailing list that can be used in case something needs to be communicated about the book or if updates are made. If you might apply for further funding down the road, having this information can also be helpful so that you can share information about who is using your OER.

Conclusion

Creating an OER can be extremely rewarding, and can benefit our students in many ways, as well as potentially reach others that we may not even anticipate. We hope that following some of these guidelines may help you to work more efficiently in creating materials that are customized to your own students and available for others to benefit from as well.