The Rebus Foundation is pleased to announce a new funding award of US $300,000 from The Hewlett Foundation to support initiatives at the Rebus Community. We are grateful for the Education team at Hewlett’s continued investment and belief in Rebus’ mission to make knowledge freely available in the pursuit of equity, understanding, and the common good.
Rebus Community is the open education and professional development arm of the Rebus Foundation. Over the last 2 years, Rebus Community has offered the Textbook Success Program (TSP) to faculty and staff around the world. This long-form, cohort-based program teaches university faculty, staff, and librarians OER publishing skills. The one year program also supports the real-time implementation of open publishing principles as teams apply concepts to their existing OER creation and adaptation projects. Rebus Community will be partnering with 2 US Department of Education funded projects to support their OER initiatives via the TSP and other OER-focused professional development programming. With generous funding from Hewlett, we plan to provide responsive training to more educators working on OER projects across the two different regions, as well as guide them through the publishing process to create OER and scaffold a course around it.
Additional support from The Hewlett Foundation will enable Rebus to collaborate with partners, advisors, and communities of practice to share insights and findings from our work across the 2 different sites with the broader open education community. The focus of our research and work in the coming years pertains to Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and OER efficacy. We hope to further strengthen the TSP curriculum, other programming, and free resources by adding new evidence-based components focused on the same.
Through this work at Rebus Community, we seek to cultivate an emerging generation of OER leaders, strengthen representation of diverse viewpoints in academia, and center student experience and learning to improve equitable outcomes. We are deeply thankful for The Hewlett Foundation’s support in our work and vision.