Publishing Process for Online Courses and Lifelong Learning

The CDE’s Digital Publishing team supports faculty in the development of Online Courses and Lifelong Learning content by using a professional publishing model to ensure that the content is published to the same high standards as edited textbooks and peer-reviewed journals. 

Once the faculty-created content is final, the Digital Publishing team will work with the Instructional Designer(s) to understand the development needed for each asset.

This process includes:

  1. Evaluating content for copyright and Fair Use.
  2. Copyediting and proofreading each asset using the CDE Style Guide. 
  3. Ensuring that all accessibility requirements are met before course content is published to the platform.

Publishing Process Graphic

Step 1: Evaluation of Copyright & Fair Use

As we continue to transition from traditional to digital classrooms and content becomes more visible than ever before, it’s important to know when and how to use copyrighted material in your course and to be deliberate when doing so.

To ensure articles, readings, images and media meet our ethical and editorial standards for world-class educational materials, all submitted content is first evaluated for copyright and Fair Use.

Step 2: Copyediting & Proofreading

As great education in large measure depends on the dissemination of clear, concise writing, the Center for Digital Education has created a Style Guide that reflects an unwavering commitment to the highest standards of precision and a guarantee to aid in effectively and consistently delivering the superior content produced by the world-class faculty of Washington University in St. Louis.

  • The CDE Style Guide has been coordinated with Olin Marketing to ensure brand consistency.

Step 3: Accessibility Evaluation

To ensure course content is accessible, the CDE has created a checklist for faculty to reference when creating classroom resources.

Creating and correcting video captions is a vital component to ensuring that accessibility requirements are met, as well as providing all students with Universally-Designed media. 

Benefits of Closed Captioning:

  • Accessibility: According to the Hearing Loss Association of America, more than 48 million Americans have some degree of hearing loss.
  • Legal Protection: Amazon, Netflix and FedEx have all been sued for lack of captioning.
  • Video SEO: Captions and transcripts provide a text version of your video so search engine bots can crawl and properly index your video.
  • Better focus, engagement and memory: “I hear, and I forget; I see, and I remember.” ~ Chinese Proverb
  • Greater flexibility for viewing content: Captions are essential to make your video comprehensible without sound for mobile, on-the-go learning.
  • Easy to create derivative content: With captions, you also get a transcript of what is being said in the video. As a result, you can scan the content of the video to easily create derivative content from it.
  • Translations: Captions make it easier to create translations into other languages. Translating your content is a great way to expand your reach. 
  • Combat silent autoplay on social media videos: If there are no video captions, your audience will just scroll past them if they don’t have the sound on because they can’t understand it.

For more information about accessibility, visit the CDE’s Creating Accessible Resources page.