Contributing to OutdoorEd.com

Is outdoor or experiential education your passion? Do you like to share your knowledge with others? Sounds like you are an outdoor education professional. The goal of Outdoor Ed is to bring together the knowledge and experience of professional educators from around the world. If you have knowledge to share, Outdoor Ed is the place to post your techniques, protocols, curriculum, philosophy, or research with the rest of the experiential education world. When you contribute, you are helping to expand and professionalize the field that we all love.

OutdoorEd.com accepts submissions of all types related to outdoor education – including technique, training, curriculum, philosophy, research, equipment, protocols, risk management, etc. Style and format is up to you. The key is to write/create on something you know well so that you can write with confidence. Materials submitted need to be “complete, stand-alone content that users can learn from.” A written document such as for a piece an outdoor education journal, a Blog post, a complete curriculum for an activity, or a risk management protocol all meet the criteria as “complete, stand-alone content that users can learn from.” A PowerPoint file from a conference presentation might only include generic bullet points and the reader would not really be able to learn from viewing the PowerPoint slides without actually hearing the speaker. This would not meet the criteria as “complete, stand-alone content that users can learn from.” If the PowerPoint included the full speaker’s notes or included audio or was in a video format it could meet the criteria. All submissions will be reviewed to make ensure that they meet this criteria and that they meet our editorial standards before being published.

Submission Formats

We accept submissions in a variety of digital formats—Word Documents, PDF files, Excel Spreadsheets, Powerpoint files, various graphic files and video formats. These can be presented as part of a published Article, Blog or Wiki on OutdoorEd.com and/or can be included in our Files Download section. Due to the large size of videos we link directly to videos hosted at YouTube or Vimeo rather than storing the videos on our server.

What you need to Provide with your Submission

When you submit something to OutdoorEd.com we want to give you as author/creator the credit for your work. If you like you can include in your submission links back to your Web site and/or contact information if you want people to be able to reach you. We also understand that you might not want to be contacted so we won’t publish your contact information with the post unless you include is as part of the post or part of your bio. Here’s what we need with your submission: 

• Title
• Date of Creation: when this material was created
• Author Name(s) and a 1-2 line bio on each author - if you want to be contacted by people reading your post, you can include your contact information here
• Contact Information: email and phone for each author. This is only to allow us to contact you about your submission and should be separate from your bio
• Short Description (100 – 200 words): used for summary posting on the Home page and for Feeds
• Any Copyright instructions: If this material is licensed under something like the Creative Commons License or other License or Copyright, we need to have the details and any links so that we can properly reference the materials

Author's Rights & Legal Issues

We respect the rights of all authors for your creative works and authors retain the right to use the material in any other setting as you see fit. If this material has already been published in another copyrighted work by the author, by submitting the material for publishing here, you and/or your publisher are grant Outdoor Ed LLC permission to reproduce it here at no charge. Once submitted to and accepted for publication all articles become the part of our site and Outdoor Ed retains the right to publish the material on the Web at this or other Web sites we administer. Outdoor Ed may not use the material in any non-Web form of publication without the express permission of the author(s). 

When using material from other sources, it is your responsibility to respect the rights of other authors like yourself. Authors are legally required to properly cite their sources and include it in a bibliography or reference section at the end of your article. Outdoor Ed does not assume any liability for copyright infringement on articles submitted to us. It is the author's responsibility to properly cite material and the author is liable for any copyright infringement.