These two papers discuss ways of improving the quality of educational texts used by the Open University in distance learning courses. The first discusses how text numbering systems should be used and when it is appropriate to use them; five recommendations are given. The last paper discusses how instructional design teams can best approach…

A survey of a range of introductory university level textbooks in the social sciences found little use of network diagrams (NDs), i.e., graphic representations of processes, organizations, systems, and mechanisms. NDs can be viewed as a text/picture hybrid medium with titles and captions serving to qualify and identify the meaning and status of…

The three papers included in this report address typography for graphic communication, typographic access structures for educational texts, and typography as macropunctuation. The first paper considers the consequences of an aesthetic bias in the literature of typography, and identifies two misleading assumptions about textbooks; i.e., that print…

Three discussion papers about the Open University's correspondence texts consider (1) the role of a transformer, i.e., any person working in communication media who is responsible for the effectiveness of his/her decisions; (2) factors involved in the design of Open University texts, including their use as a resource for a range of different…