🌐Overview

Once your structure and templates are in place, it’s time to begin drafting. Effective OER development goes beyond writing. It means building a resource that is sustainable, accessible, and legally sound. Assets such as images, charts, tables, videos, and sidebars enrich student engagement and comprehension. But they must be used legally, consistently, and accessibly.

This section explains how to manage and document visual and multimedia content. It ensures all materials meet accessibility standards from the beginning. It also underscores the importance of aligning these practices with your team’s collaborative workflow and licensing requirements. This is where your style guide becomes a living document and your planning starts to take tangible shape.

📖 Table of Contents

Quality Assurance: A Cyclical Process
- Key Takeaways
Maintaining Assets
- Why Asset Management Matters
Open Licenses in the Final Product
- Attributions
- License Compatibility of Remixed Content

✔️ Quality Assurance: A Cyclical Process

Create checkpoints for asset review across your authoring timeline

Early Draft. Add placeholder descriptions and begin the asset list
Mid-Draft. Insert assets with draft alt text and review legal status
Pre-Publication. Conduct a full accessibility and attribution check
Post-Publication. Re-review asset licenses, links, and captions annually

Assign clear roles

Authors. On collaborative projects, authors should write content and review other chapters to ensure consistency in style and tone.
Reviewer. While all authors should be reviewers, it is also helpful to have external reviewers. Reviewers can help with consistency during writing. At the end, different reviewers can check the overall flow and cohesion of the resource.
For larger teams. Consider also including specialized roles that are focused on individual elements:
- Archivist to maintain asset tracking and licensing
- Accessibility Lead to regularly check accessibility
- DEI reviewer to mitigate bias and ensure inclusion
- Assign a team member as a style editor or rotate the role

📌 Key Takeaways

Regularly revisiting templates and style guides maintains consistency as the project grows and settles into its final form.
Centralized asset tracking saves time and ensures consistency across large projects.
Accessibility isn’t a checklist at the end—it’s a mindset embedded in every image, video, and table you select.
Legal clarity now prevents removal, takedown, or embarrassment later.
Diversity and inclusion in visual design fosters belonging.

🦅 Wisdom: Embrace the wisdom of the eagle. When authors are deep into the writing process, it can become easy to forget the big picture. Take time to regularly step back and review the project from a broader perspective and look for any mice that might cause problems later 🐁

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✔️ Maintaining Assets

All OER projects should begin with a review of existing resources. This was discussed in Unit 2.2: Conducting a Resource Audit. The asset tracking sheet should be continually updated as authors create the resource. If authors are using many existing resources, you may want to create separate tabs in the spreadsheet that list resources used in each chapter. Be sure that the asset tracking sheet identifies the following for each asset

Asset Log: Resource NameDescriptive title for the asset (e.g., "Carbon Cycle Diagram").
Type of Asset: Image, chart, table, audio, video, etc.
Source URL: Direct link to the original asset.
License Type: CC-BY, CC-BY-SA, public domain, etc.
Author or Creator: Original creator or source name.
Modifications Made: Note if cropped, captioned, color-corrected, etc.Proposed
Caption: Short description for readers and alt text users.
Placement: Chapter, section, and page where the asset will appear.Accessibility StatusAlt text added? Captioned? Color-contrast compliant?

📌 Why Asset Management Matters

Ensures proper attribution and legal compliance with Creative Commons and public domain content.
Builds equitable access for students with disabilities by planning for alternative text, captions, and contrast.
Supports long-term updates and version control by maintaining a centralized, editable record of all non-textual elements.
Allows collaborators to stay aligned and avoid duplication or inconsistent use of visuals.

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✔️ Open Licenses in the Final Product

📌 Attributions

Double check that all resources are properly attributed including

Title of the work with a link to the original source
Author
License with a link to the license deed

Don't Forget about Images! “Faculty seem to understand attribution with text but often forget about images.” —Shane Nackerud, UM Libraries. Be especially cautious with images. A visually perfect photo can’t be used without the correct license. Always record the license type of reused material (text, images, videos, etc.) and integrate Attribution and Licensing as you go.

📌 License Compatibility of Remixed Content

The more resources that are combined, the more complex the licensing considerations. Be sure to regularly check that the remixed content has compatible licenses. Also be sure that the final product has a compatible license. One benefit of using a platform with separate pages is that it reduces the number of licenses to think about. For example, in LibreTexts, each page is a separate work. Therefore, only content on a single page needs to be compatible. However, if you have different licenses for each page of your book, be sure this is identified in the Front Matter.

Identifying the licenses of components usable for a final product with a given license
lincenses	final product license	final product license	final product license	final product license	final product license	final product license	final product license
components	OK	OK	OK	OK	OK	OK	OK
components	No	OK	OK	OK	OK	OK	OK
components	No	No	OK	No	No	No	No
components	No	No	No	OK	OK	No	OK
components	No	No	No	No	OK	No	No
components	No	No	No	No	No	No	No
components	No	No	No	No	No	No	No

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