ROTEL Quality Assurance

During the second year working with ROTEL, it became clear to the Publishing Support Team that we needed stronger quality assurance. I took over as lead in that work with a focus on style, accessibility, and UX standards for the majority of the published books through this project. Utilizing best practice tools for these areas, such as the WAVE tool for web accessibility, I brought each ROTEL Project book’s quality up to the Project’s standards.

In an example of my work on accessibility and user experience, one of the institutions within the grant, Northern Essex Community College, requested a Spanish-language version of one of the previously published ROTEL textbooks: The Whole Child. Because NECC has a large Spanish-speaking population, they wanted the book to be available for those students. I worked with another faculty member on NECC’s campus to produce a Spanish translation of the text, El Niño Entero. My efforts consisted of facilitating a direct comparison to the English version that would allow for bilingual and Spanish-speaking students to access the same material in the same way without a language barrier.

Canvas Outcomes Project

I volunteered to tackle the task of processing and presenting the data in digestible forms for the Faculty Committees and the Assessment Reports. The assessment data was recorded using the LMS Canvas Outcomes tool which was then downloaded into CSV files. In this process, I established a workflow utilizing formulas in Excel, and these formulas would later become the basis for the more automated process that the office uses today.

The Crystal Chronicle

My editing work for The Crystal Chronicle consisted of proofreading articles before opening a dialogue with writers so they could make changes on deadline.

As Editor-in-Chief, I was responsible for story assignments and managing of the staff for the publication. This included maintaining schedules and organizing and motivating writers to submit their stories early enough to allow editing and still meet the strict weekly deadline.

My additional responsibilities included meeting with the layout manager weekly to make editorial changes as necessary to accommodate design needs. This could include adjusting text formatting, revising sentence and paragraph length to ensure readability, and how and where to break an article up to allow for a multi-page layout.

Due to the nature of the publication and the video game it is associated with, each contributor used a pseudonym for this publication. I am credited as Deidra Rose.