I made some minor updates to the Course Guide and Editing Checklist to reflect changes in our processes and wording from November and December 2016.
I hope to update the best practice wording soon to document our new processes, reporting responsibilities, and checklist.
Students have a wealth of knowledge and experiences from which to draw; however, at the start of a course they are not experts in the course concepts. One way to communicate concepts clearly to non-experts is to use plain language principles so the writer’s ideas can be easily understandable by anyone. This might include: Defining new…
I recommend this excellent “Assessment Editing” blog post at the ACES website. Evelyn Mellone and David Pisano are language proficiency test editors at the U.S. Defense Language Institute. They presented a workshop on editing assessments to ACES members, and their PowerPoint notes offer best practices and areas of concern that will be useful for anyone editing…
Our editing goal is to make learner-centred courses that meet the needs of our students. But how can we know if we have achieved this, since we seldom have the chance to meet Open Learning students face-to-face? One valuable resource is to check student feedback from post-course surveys in Tableau. This can indicate which specific…
A recent human service (HUMS) course has a lesson about using critical reflection to uncover and deconstruct assumptions. The lesson explores how language is changing to acknowledge nonbinary-gendered people through pronouns. For example, a writer might choose “they” as a singular pronoun instead of “he” or “she”. Using “they” as both singular and plural pronouns shouldn’t seem that…
Two new editors joined the editing team in December. Welcome Courtney and Josie! The amount of new info may seem overwhelming and confusing, but we’re here to help. Ask us questions if you have any, and please do suggest new and better solutions to our processes. Our team works best with everyone sharing ideas and…
Some of the course developers we work with are new to using MS Word’s track changes. When the editor sends a query or document for review, the number of changes shown could be overwhelming. This tutorial on MS Word 2010 could help: Lynda.com. (2013, April 7). Word tutorial: How to track changes in documents (4:34) [Video]. Retrieved from https://youtu.be/5_knruAysnA.