Starting with a familiar tool may be the way to go for many. Simply publishing existing Word documents to the web and inviting others to use them is one way to begin publishing OER. However, there are additional steps that should be taken to ensure the published resource is truly open and accessible. Word is a proprietary format. It may seem like "everyone owns a copy of Microsoft Office", but that is far from true. Taking steps at the start will make it easier to convert a Word document from a proprietary format into something that is more universal or open.
Below, I've provided links to download two Word documents provided by the Open Science Foundation. At the Open Science Foundation website, you'll find additional accessible templates for PowerPoint, as well as information about the foundations and importance or readability and accessibility. For the Word templates below, one is a blank template, the other is an explanation and guide to using the template. If you are creating your document from scratch, using a template like this is highly recommended. If you are converting an existing document, you may be tempted to copy and paste sections into the template.
Beware that a copy and paste from Word or the Web will often also copy the underlying styles. If you copy a section of text that is styled as normal text in your original document and paste it into the template in the Heading 2 section, it will overwrite the heading 2 designation, negating the accessibility of the template. Copy and paste can work. You just have to be careful to notice if it changes the style and change it back to the appropriate designation.
A link to additional accessible templates for Office products is also provided below. In addition, Office products now have a built-in accessibility checker. Simply Select Review >Check Accessibility and review the noted results.
Once your document is complete and accessible, you could share the document as is. However as stated in the introduction, Word is a proprietary format and therefore not as free and open as desired. In all likeliehood, you may want to offer your resources in several formats for download
You can save your document as a PDF, but that is also proprietary format and also much more difficult to edit for remixing. Many OER publications do offer PDF as an option for use by learners, and luckily that is easily accomplished using the Save As feature built into Office products. In addition to PDF, you might want to offer a Rich Text File (RTF) or XML/XHTML version of your resource which are also easy to create using the Save As feature. A list of common OER file types for text and other media can be found in the OER Handbook, which also lists the preferred format for OER.
ePub is a special open format that you may come across. It is an open standard for eBooks that uses XML and XHTML. ePub is used by all the major eBook vendors including iBooks and Amazon. In addition to PDF, OER texts often offer ePub as a download option. However there is no straight forward, built-in feature to create ePubs from a Word document.
Both Calibre and Google Docs can work with .doc files and have a native function to save as or export as ePub. The success of of the conversion is very much dependent on creating a well structured Word document in the first place by using an accessible template that uses the heading and other style functions.
Once you have your completed resource in a variety of formats, you'll need a place for it to live. We'll discuss that next in the Publishing section.
The OER Commons website offers a platform for creating open resources called Open Author. You must create a free account to use Open Author, however it is purpose built to create accessible open educational resources. Open Author even has the ability to import documents from Google Drive. (There used to be an import from Microsoft Office OneDrive, which would have provided import of Word documents, but that seems to have disappeared).
Of course, you can also start form scratch in Open Author. It includes many useful and easy to use features in its editor, including the ability to create formulas, tables create separate teacher and students views and check for accessibility. Resources created in Open Author can be added to OER Commons which we will learn about in the publishing and directories sections. Resources can also be downloaded in a variety of formats including ePub, PDF, and packages designed for Learning Management Systems.
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