Rebus Community Reports : Insights from OER Project Leads

Abstract

This collection of short narratives provides insight into the process of creating open textbooks and other open educational resources (OER). Over the first months of 2019, Donna Langille (Rebus’s then practicum student) interviewed project leads who have used the Rebus Community publishing platform since 2017. Her write-ups of these interviews focus on the benefits, challenges, and vision of publishing openly. The projects range broadly—from conducting literature reviews for nursing students to building a student-driven anthology of Spanish literature, from opening up LGTBQ+ studies to an international readership to designing a multimedia guide for learning sight reading for guitar. Unifying these diverse publications is the common practice of making publishing into a community-driven act, and throughout, readers will discover that open publishing comes with many different rewards. Indeed, what becomes clear is that making books also makes community—a community that is in the process of reinventing how knowledge is made, shared, and reimagined.