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Stage 4 - Produce

To contrive is nothing! To construct is something! To produce is everything! - Edward Rickenbacker

Choose Tools & Formats

Collaborative environment for team work

Choose an environment for producing the learning material that will enable multiple people to work on the same material at one. Two examples are workplace or GitHub (find out more here). Replicate the folder tree in the environment and start using the provided templates to generate the content.

Granular versioning for easy rollback

Versioning helps you maintain control over your changes. If the collaborative environment does not provide versioning and history retention then keep a history of the files by adopting a naming convention such as combining the file name with an increasing version number.

Open file formats to foster reuse

For other people to reuse your materials they should be made available using open file formats (docx, pptx, pdf, md, html, etc.). If you use close file formats then you MUST clearly state the tools that have been used for development in your README file.

Multimodal content to reach all audience

Don't forget to include different types of multimedia to provide support for different learning modalities: read/write, auditory, visual, kinesthetic.

Two file sets: editable + final

Always work with and keep a history of your editable files. These are what matters for you and other instructors. The second set of final files should be obtained from the editable when needed (before distributing them to the learners). The final files should be kept on the learning platform only. In this way you don't need to worry about keeping the versions in sync.

Don't forget to support co-creation

Truly FAIR learning materials should enable co-creation with external parties. If you don't use a collaborative environment that supports this from the start (such as GitHub), then think how are you going to enable this in the future and how are you going to deal with versioning then.

Plan to reuse existing material?

Accessibility

The developed learning materials should cover the widest range of learner variability including the ones that use or do not use assistive technology.

Accessibility logo
"Universal Access Human" by J S from Pixabay

Standards

There are several standards that govern the rules on level of accessibility.

Most commonly used is the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) standard version 2.1. Three conformance levels exist, you should aim for AA which is the middle one.

PDF document accessibility is measured with a separate technical specification PDF/UA (Universal Accessibility).

Learn more

  • Use accessibility evaluation tools!

    Accessibility evaluation tools are not perfect. Even if they say that all is ok, it does not mean that your content is truly accessible. But they are a very good starting point.

    Use the integrated accessibility checker in Power Point:

    1. Open an existing presentation in PowerPoint and review the content.
    2. Select the Review tab.
    3. Select Check Accessibility.
    4. An Accessibility Checker pane will appear on the right with 'Inspection Results' displayed.

    Choose from the Web Accessibility Evaluation Tools List developed by W3C.

    Check accessibility in Adobe Acrobat Pro.

    Open the PDF and then from the All tools menu on the left, select View more and then select Prepare for accessibility.

Internal QA

  • QA Self-assessment: Check if everything is as it should be.
  • Quantitative: Are all required elements produced?
  • Qualitative: Do all learning units provide materials to reach the learning objectives with different modalities?

Start an in-depth training on the Produce stage.... FAIR-by-Design Methodology: Produce stage....