Publication Process

Key Points

• Set clear goals on the scope and character of your OpenCourseWare. Factors that will drive the size and complexity of the publishing process include whether you publish all courses or just exemplars, and how much you repackage materials for external audiences.
• Minimize burden on faculty by integrating the publishing process as much as possible with the faculty's normal process for creating and managing course materials for classroom teaching.

It is important to establish the long-term goals of the publishing initiative early in the process. The type of organization you need, the number and complexity of publishing processes, as well as the technical infrastructure you need to put in place, will depend on the early key decisions about your organization's goals.

For example, if your goal is to publish a handful of courses online, implementing a complex content management system may be overkill; if on the other hand your goal is to publish all of the institution's available course materials online, it is imperative that your organization implement well-defined policies and procedures, and systems that can enforce those policies and procedures.

What you decide to publish depends on what is driving your publishing initiative. Listed below are some potential goals institutions might adopt:

• Publish ALL of your institution's available course materials online. Develop a broad and deep resource that provides significant internal benefits.
• Publish "best of" courses to showcase what the institution has to offer. Use the site to "market" the institution to potential students by showcasing the best the institute has to offer.
• Publish courses from selected departments. Similar to "best of," but the focus is on highlighting a specific department(s).
• Publish courses by selected faculty: Another variant of the "best of" concept; you may want to highlight works by your top faculty.

Publishing processes are strongly influenced by the existing technical environment of the publishing schools, and a wide range of models are in use throughout the OpenCourseWare Consortium. In nearly all cases, however, a key guiding principle has been to minimize the impact of publication on faculty time.