Who is this advice for? ALL authors! You are each writing your first chapter for the project. At the end of Unit 8, the Lead Author will submit one chapter per author (not one chapter per project). Contributing Authors will submit their chapters to their Lead Author, who will then submit all chapters for Developmental Review.

Ultimately your audience is your students. However, at this point you can rest assured that your draft will go through multiple review checkpoints before it is in front of students. The advice here is about getting a chapter draft on the page. In the next several units we get into more detail about style and language choices.

The first readers of this draft will be your Lead Author and your Developmental Editor.

Choosing to Start

At this stage in the project timeline, your {Course #} About This Book document is just about ready to be sent off. You may not feel ready to begin drafting your first chapter, but here’s where an important piece of advice from Instructional Editor Stephanie Lenox comes in: Write before you’re ready.

If you’re someone who likes to plan and ponder and prepare, you may feel the need to do more research, wait for feedback from the preliminary review, or gather with your team one more time before you dive into writing your first chapter draft. You may want to conduct some interviews, read a few more articles, or go back to the outline and restructure. The impulse is completely understandable.

Don’t give in to that impulse. Don’t wait for a stretch of uninterrupted time or a bright burning idea to get to work. Don’t wait for your external reviewers’ feedback. Yes, this is counterintuitive! The fact is that you may never feel completely ready, so start to write anyway.

Choosing Your First Chapter to Draft

Each author team will have its own reasons for assigning first chapters to authors. You don’t need to go in order, starting with Chapter 1 and progressing to Chapter 2, and so on. Your outline will help you keep track of where one chapter ends and the next begins, so you can dive into Chapter 5 if that’s the one you want to do first.

Maybe each author will pick the chapter they are most excited and confident about, or the one they want to have the most time to work on. There’s no wrong answer, provided you get started right away. Each author’s next milestone is to get one whole chapter complete by the end of Unit 8, which is in two months and one week.

Can Generative AI Write Your Chapter for You?

This is an emergent topic and our guidance for authors will likely change over time, but for now the answer is likely no – or, more precisely, to proceed with caution and prepare to spend extra time on your task.

If you already enjoy using GenAI tools as part of your writing process, we won’t stop you from continuing. Keep in mind, though, that we are unable to provide training or support for instructors who use GenAI on our projects. We also need you to take into account the three caveats below.

First, the outputs of GenAI tools can contain incorrect information due to a phenomenon known as hallucination, where a GenAI’s response to a prompt includes what it deems to be the most correct-sounding response, without the response being factually correct. You must carefully fact-check anything that a GenAI tool produces.

Second, we are not given access to the materials used to train or validate the many GenAI tools you might use, and it is very likely that the corpus or validation methods were not chosen with an equity lens. This means that anything produced with GenAI tools will likely reflect historical biases and you will have a big revision job to do to keep your materials aligned with our project’s equity goals. Please consider the Seven Forms of Bias in Instructional Materials [Website] (invisibility, stereotyping, imbalance, unreality, fragmentation, linguistic, and cosmetic bias) and make sure that your tech tool is not introducing any bias into your work.

Third, you must understand the copyright and licensing issues that may affect your work. You’ll need to attribute revised GenAI generated content and keep track of its role in the work so that you can clarify what tools were used, which sections were AI-generated, different copyright/licensing of those portions, etc. You will also need to review the licensing terms of the specific AI tool you used to ensure legal use of the output.

We suspect that after you’ve crafted the perfect prompt to get what you want, and gone through these steps to get the text ready to share widely in an openly licensed textbook, you might have outsourced the creative parts to a fancy algorithm and left your human self with all the tedious tasks!

All this said, here are three resources that we recommend for anyone interested in experimenting with GenAI:

• Affordable Learning Georgia’s Guidelines for Using Generative AI Tools in Open Educational Resources [Website] explains copyright and ethical considerations for OER authors.
• University of Kentucky’s Generative AI Policy for OER [Website] provides concise guidelines for authors.
• Open Oregon Educational Resources’ Attribution Style Guide [Website] provides examples of how to attribute revised GenAI generated content.

Structuring Your Time

This stage of the project takes a lot of work. The Project Manager will help you make a timeline and weekly goals in the “Chapter Draft To-Dos” tab of the Deliverables spreadsheet to successfully get your chapter completed by the deadline at the end of Month 4. We recommend making any edits your team needs in this tab to make it work for you.

In this unit and the following two units, we recommend approaching your chapter draft in this order:

1. Unit 6 (one week): Bring in background scan content, with attribution.
2. Unit 7 (one month): Draft original content for your chapter body with an equity lens.
3. Unit 8 (one month): Draft openers, closers, spotlights, and figures.

You don’t have to follow these recommendations exactly. If there is a spotlight you’re excited to draft, if you run across a great definition for a key term, or if you already know which discussion questions work well for your content, go ahead and add them to your chapter document. If you’re not sure what to tackle next, come back to our recommendations to stay on track.

At this point, your author team must determine whether to keep your weekly meeting cadence or meet less often. If you move to a biweekly or monthly meeting, it can be helpful to schedule email updates each week with one another, letting your team know what you’re working on and catching up on what the team is focused on that week.

Sometimes, authors can isolate themselves, thinking that it is all up to them and no one else is available to help. Creating a group email thread to report on progress and challenges can boost motivation and confidence as you draft. If you notice you are pulling back from your team, challenge yourself to send a quick update on your progress or goals. Connecting, even when you’re facing challenges, helps to support the exchange of ideas and lends transparency about the hard parts of writing a chapter.

Even though we’re moving away from weekly units for the rest of Year 1, we expect that you will continue to work on this project every week in order to meet your targets. A writing group like VOWəL [Website] can help you schedule writing time and stay accountable to your writing goals.

Getting Help When Timing is Off-Track

There are many reasons why life happens and may cause you to fall behind, hit a roadblock, or otherwise interfere with the ambitious timeline of this project. When this happens, we will do our best to work with you on a solution.

If you need help, the first person to contact is the Project Manager. Here are some examples of additional support they can either provide or connect you with from the support team:

• Ideas for additional contributors or additional content types
• Support with Google Docs such as applying structured headers or working in shared spaces
• Check-ins to make sure attributions are present for each chapter section
• Encouragement to keep writing

The more lead time you give the Project Manager with these requests, the better the result will be. We’ve found that it can be surprisingly time-consuming to receive help. Asking for help right away will enable us to have more of a time cushion to work with you.

Here is a personal note from me, Amy. I love writing but I’m a terrible procrastinator. Every time I get into a flow state working on this project, I’m reminded how much more fun writing is than procrastinating – but I still find tons of ways to waste time and then beat myself up about it!

Maybe you experience the same thing, or maybe you face different challenges when you have a large project to work on. At this stage in your career, you are probably very aware of your own productivity blocks. You will likely need all of your past successful strategies, and maybe some new ones as well, to complete this project. We’ll use project meeting time during this unit to share strategies for overcoming writing challenges.

Licenses and Attributions for How to Start Writing Chapters

Open content, original

“How to Start Writing Chapters” by Open Oregon Educational Resources is licensed under CC BY NC SA 4.0.

Open content, shared previously

“Can Generative AI write your chapter for you?” is adapted from AI Pause by Amy Hofer and Veronica Vold and is licensed under CC BY 4.0. Thank you to Jeff Gallant, Program Director, Affordable Learning Georgia, and Stephen Krueger, Affordable Course Content Librarian, University of Kentucky, for assistance with this blog post.

“Choosing to start” is adapted from Choosing to Start by Stephanie Lenox for Chemeketa Press, licensed under CC BY NC SA 4.0.

“Choosing Your First Chapter to Draft” is adapted from Identifying Your First Draft by Stephanie Lenox for Chemeketa Press, licensed under CC BY NC SA 4.0.