Category: Open Textbook Projects

If you’re interested in using the Rebus Community collaboration software for your Open Textbook or OER project, now’s your chance! Fill out our application form to register your project.

On May 16, we will launch the Rebus Community Projects platform – a custom-built project management tool for collaboration on Open Educational Resources (OER) publishing projects around the world. We will launch with 10 (selected) beta OER/open textbook publishing projects, and the platform will be open to all volunteers. Would you like your OER project to be a part of our beta? If so, tell us about it!

About the platform

While most project management software is designed for broad use, Rebus Community Projects is specifically customized for open textbook/OER projects and the communities that form around them. With the first release of the platform happening in mid-May, we are now looking for projects to trial the tool as part of their open textbook/OER publishing efforts.

About the beta

Accepted Beta projects will get full access to the tools, as well as some support from the Rebus team over the course of their project. All Beta users will have the chance to (directly and indirectly) inform our product development process, and help shape the future of the Rebus Community and our approach to publishing open textbooks.

Is your project a beta candidate?

Candidate OER projects for the beta should meet the following criteria:

• The project aims to create an open textbook/OER which can be used in courses at a higher education institution.
• The resulting textbook and associated materials will be published under a CC-BY license. (Note: for projects involving traditional knowledge or other similar content, we will work with project teams to amend our licensing policy as needed).
• The text will be published online and made available in editable formats.
• The project has a responsible and dedicated project manager, lead author or leadership team.
• At least one member of the project team can communicate with the Rebus team in English. (Note: the textbook itself can be in any language.)
• The project team understands that Rebus Projects is in a beta phase, and is willing to actively engage with the process to support its development.

In addition, we have particular interest in working with projects that:

1. Are based outside North America (with the caveat that our platform and working language is currently English),
2. Include and highlight traditionally marginalised voices and communities,
3. Are at the peer review stage, OR
4. Fit into any combination of the above.

Why are we prioritizing these areas?

The Rebus mission has always been to support collaborative open textbook publishing for all subjects, in all languages, everywhere in the world. This mission is a kind of shorthand for what we think is possible with OER, and drives everything we do — big and small.

In this case, it’s driving us to recruit projects that fit the categories above. Here’s why:

1. We want to work with projects outside North America in order to further develop our model to suit many different regional contexts. We acknowledge that language will be a barrier for many, and are taking steps towards supporting more languages in future, but for now, we appreciate the extra effort made by project teams and contributors who work with us in English when it is not their preferred language. Beyond language, we also want to make sure that the decisions we make about features, user experience, process, etc. are not made with only one type of user in mind. We aren’t fulfilling our mission unless we’re involving people from all regions of the globe.
2. We are seeking projects that include and promote marginalised voices and communities because we believe that open education has the power to make education more equitable and to promote content that is not well served by traditional publishing models. Supporting traditionally marginalised people, ideas, and approaches to education is critical to that vision.
3. We want to hear from projects in peer review in order to further develop our approach to managing this phase of the publishing process. We are working towards a clear, replicable peer review process that can be used by anyone, and community input is invaluable to be sure it is a constructive process for both creators and reviewers. Peer review plays an important role in ensuring content quality, but can also play a less desirable part in gatekeeping, so needs to be carefully managed.

Why join our beta?

Joining the Rebus Community Projects beta will, we hope, deliver a host of benefits to project, including:

• A public web listing of your project, where basic information of your project, team, activities, discussion threads, and documents can be shared. This listing can be used to promote the project, generate interest from potential adopters, and recruit collaborators.
• Support & guidance on the publishing process from the Rebus team and the wider Community via the Rebus Community Forum
• Guides and templates related to the OER publishing process
• Amplification of recruitment calls and project updates in the Rebus Community’s media channels (newsletter, blog, social media, etc.)
• An onboarding call with the Rebus Community, with training on how to use the platform*
• Four one-hour drop-in webinars, where you can pose questions and talk through challenges in the process*
• Access to the Rebus Press (powered by Pressbooks), if needed
• An opportunity to contribute directly to the development of tools and resources that benefit the wider OER community

*All calls will be recorded and made available for project teams whose work day does not align with that of the Rebus team (based in Montreal, QC). Efforts will be made to run individual and asynchronous sessions wherever possible.

How do I apply to be a beta project?

If you would like to submit your project for consideration to become one of our first Rebus Community Projects platform beta projects, please fill in our application form.

Have questions about the platform, or the Rebus Community? Please contact us.

• Health issues in northern and Indigenous communities
• Health systems and governance
• The social determinants of health in northern and Indigenous communities
• Culture and health
• Professional practice in rural/remote/isolated communities

Head to the Rebus Community forum or contact Heather for more information and ways to contribute!

We are seeking chapter contributions (7,000-9,000 words) and section contributions (roughly 1,000 words) on a range of topics for the first volume of the History of Applied Science and Technology open textbook, led by Danielle Skjelver (UMUC).

Authors should have experience teaching first-year history courses, as the text is aimed at first-year undergraduate students. We are currently looking for authors for the following chapters and sections:

• Egyptian and Babylonian Science before 500 BCE (~1,000 words)
• Doing History (primary source section) before 500 BCE (500-1,000 words including source text)
• Greek World 500 BCE-500 CE (~1,000 words)
• North Africa 500 BCE-500 CE (~1,000 words)
• Oceania 500 BCE-500 CE (~1,000 words)
• Doing History 500 BCE-500 CE (500-1,000 words including source text)
• Golden Age of Islam 500-1400 CE (7-9,000 words)

If you’re interested in participating, please contact Danielle Skjelver and include details of your teaching and research experience. We welcome contributions from faculty and Ph.D. students (ABD), and encourage interest and contributions from members of underrepresented groups within the history community.

We are seeking chapter contributions of 2,000-3,000 words (8-10 pages double-spaced) on a range of topics within metaphysics and philosophy of mind for the Introduction to Philosophy open textbook, edited by Christina Hendricks (UBC). We encourage interest and contributions from members of underrepresented groups within the philosophical community.

Philosophy of Mind

We are looking for one or two chapter contributions on the subjects of behaviorism and materialism (identity theory of the mind). Chapters should be written for a smart undergraduate student population being exposed to philosophy of mind for the first time. Send a CV and a short paragraph of your experience in teaching philosophy of mind to Heather Salazar at hsalazar@wne.edu with the subject heading “Phil Mind Open Text.”

Metaphysics

Authors are needed for the following chapters (descriptions available):

• Finitism, infinitism, monism, dualism, pluralism (Counting 1)
• Case study: what if anything are numbers? (Counting 2)
• Case study: metaphysics on a human scale asks whether there is free action
• Case study: what are universals?
• Notes on methods: is there an experimental metaphysics?
• The difficult contacts between religious and physicalistic metaphysics
• Topics for further study

Please send a CV, including details of your teaching and research experience, to Palma Adriano, and copy Apurva Ashok.

The Open Anthology of Earlier American Literature continues to grow and evolve. Robin DeRosa, professor at Plymouth State University, and her students, who were looking for a cost-savings anthology for their classroom, started the project. Now, with support from the Rebus Community, the book is under the wing of a new lead editor, Timothy Robbins, assistant professor of English at Graceland University. The anthology has since expanded to include more texts, with collaborators from institutions around the U.S. contributing to the book.

Next, Tim will present the anthology and its iterations at the annual Modern Language Association convention on Jan. 5. He will show Robin’s initial book shell, Abby Goode’s recent classroom-led revision, his own class’s revisions, and the current work in progress with Rebus. If you’re in New York, we encourage you to attend Tim’s session and learn more about this dynamic project.

Inspired by Robin’s experience, Tim included an assignment in his course for students to help expand the anthology. His students read through the texts in Robin’s shell, which included what Tim calls a “potpourri of canonical and ‘minor’ writers.” Tim says his students completed activities to guide their classroom discussions and also give them the skills needed to build the anthology, which they did in teams near the end of the semester.

As part of the process, Tim’s students read about and discussed open education and Creative Commons licensing. Early in the term, student teams participated in developing criteria for evaluation and grading. Tim says that he found this “practice forced students to take a kind of critical ownership of the project by thinking both proactively and reflectively on their own learning and engagement.”

During the term, students used the Pressbooks software to format the anthology. They located and annotated secondary research, edited texts, wrote introductions, all while focusing on “how to make the texts ‘teachable.’” At the end of the semester, teams led a classroom lesson based on their newly designed anthology chapter. The expanded anthology included entries for authors and texts not yet represented in traditional texts.

“My own ‘American Literature to 1900’ course charts some of the various, often contentious stories of “American” culture’s movements towards inclusion, emancipation, and equality across those four centuries of coverage,” Tim says. “When I took on the project with Rebus, I knew that inclination would color the anthology’s roster, a case reinforced in the current Table of Contents. As expected, the sections track roughly chronologically and feature representative authors and texts. Indigenous creation stories confront European colonial documents; the early texts of New England’s Puritan pulpits are met and challenged by the voices and pens of native peoples, African slaves, and women writers. The American Revolution gives way to an explosion of social movements and an expansion of the canon stretching from Thomas Paine’s republican propaganda to the birth of African-American letters in Phillis Wheatley. The selections from the early nineteenth century include the familiar names of the ‘American Renaissance’—Emerson, Poe, Hawthorne, Whitman, Melville—in tandem with the literature of abolitionism. The post-Civil War sections aim to balance the significant social writings of the Gilded Age and Reconstruction era with the emergence of realist fiction.”

Robin DeRosa reflects on the expansion, saying: “When my students and I created the first version of The Open Anthology of Earlier American Literature, we were mainly trying to save money. Students were regularly paying about $85 to purchase an anthology full of literature that was virtually all in the public domain. The first Fall that we used the book started off a little rough: We realized it didn’t have any of the introductions or illustrations or annotations that students generally rely on in commercial anthologies. So that semester, students started adding these things to the book, and before long, we realized that the cost-savings were the least exciting part of our dynamic, student-generated textbook. By the end of that semester, students had created lots of great content, other schools had begun using the book, and I had a whole new sense of the pedagogical possibilities inherent in open textbooks.”

Rebus is excited to be building off of Robin and her students’ work, and could not be more grateful to have Tim at the helm. With Rebus’ support, further entries have been added to the anthology, with more expected in 2018. Roughly 30 entries are completed and polished, and we’re seeking more contributors, including people to take the lead on organizing and writing introductions to the various periodized sections. Tim’s student assistants at Graceland have been charged with line editing, and he has also enlisted a graphic design major to help create a new cover for the anthology.

Robin is proud to see the anthology grow. “Now that Rebus is facilitating a more coordinated expansion of the project, you can’t imagine the pride that my students and I feel knowing that our initial work was the seed that led to the emergence of what will be such a game-changing text,” she says. “There is nothing in my career I feel prouder of being a part of than this project, and I am so grateful to the current editors and team at Rebus for taking our small idea and growing it so beautifully: What a wonderful example of the open community at work!”

The open text is gearing up towards an official launch in the summer, but given the nature of this project, the text will continue to evolve and grow indefinitely. Stay tuned for more updates later in the year, and for those who’ll be in New York in January, please support Tim at the MLA convention on Jan. 5!

If you’d like to collaborate with us on this unique project, please let us know in the Rebus Community forum.