Please Take This Survey, Part of our Mellon-Funded Research on Digital Reading Experiences
As part of our Andrew W. Mellon Foundation-funded research project to prototype an open, web-based reading system, we are conducting a survey on “deep reading” experiences of longform works, like scholarly monographs. This survey will help us to better understand the benefits and limitations of current digital reading experiences and help us think about what they could be. We will summarize the findings in a public report available on the Rebus Foundation website in January 2018. If you’re an active reader of monographs for your research or other scholarly work, please take the survey and share with faculty, librarians, and graduate students in your network. The survey closes on Nov. 1 at 11:59pm EST.
Rebus Community Pilot Open Textbook Projects Launch
It’s been almost a year since we launched the Rebus Community for Open Textbook Creation. In that time, we’ve taken on 18 active pilot open textbook projects, some of which are starting to appear in classrooms. So far, three pilot open textbook projects Rebus has supported have either officially launched or entered a beta testing period.
- Financial Strategy for Public Managers, led by Justin Marlowe and Sharon Kioko at University of Washington, is complete and will be used in classrooms starting this Fall! The book is free and openly available in web, PDF, ebook, and other formats from the book homepage. This is the first book we’ve assisted with getting into print-on-demand (POD), and it is also available on Amazon, where it was the No. 1 new release in Government Accounting for its first several weeks.
- This Fall, nine instructors and their students are expanding theAntología abierta de literatura hispana (Open Anthology of Hispanic Literature, AALH) by implementing a critical edition assignment in their classrooms. The AALH is a collection of public-domain texts from the Hispanic world, with critical introductions and annotations in Spanish by undergraduate students in Julie Ward’s Introduction to Hispanic Literature and Culture course at the University of Oklahoma. Rebus supported the development of an implementation guide for instructors who wish to replicate the assignment, and also helped find faculty collaborators.
- The Media Innovation & Entrepreneurship open textbook, led by Michelle Ferrier at Ohio University and Elizabeth Mays of the Rebus Community and Arizona State University, is now in public beta testing and open review. The project leads are collecting feedback and implementing revisions to prepare for an official release in January 2018.
Do you know someone who would like to adopt these initial projects, or help to expand them? Please put us in touch! Another 15 projects are still in progress, with several others also nearing release. You can view all our active projects on the Rebus Community Forum.
Coming Soon: Rebus Projects
Our work with the projects above is informing the development of software that will enable collaborative open textbook creation. We’ll be launching version 0 of Rebus Projects soon. Stay tuned!
New Resource from the Rebus Community: A Guide to Making Open Textbooks With Students
As we build a new, collaborative model for open textbook publishing, one of our goals is to make the process of creating or contributing to an open textbook easier. To that end, we collaborated with faculty and student pioneers in open education to develop a Guide to Making Open Textbooks With Students. This resource contains essays from open pedagogy practitioners including Robin DeRosa and Rajiv Jhangiani; first-person accounts and interviews with students and faculty engaged in open textbook projects; assignments and project ideas; and resources such as a guide to CC licensing and MOU for students and faculty. Student participation in creating open textbooks is an exciting and emerging field, and we hope this resource will help to support both students and instructors as they branch out and start to explore the possibilities. Please share the guide with your networks!
Like what we’re doing? Please get in touch if you’ve got any ideas, feedback or thoughts for us!