First edition of Media Innovation & Entrepreneurship Open Textbook Available for Adoption!
The first edition of Media Innovation and Entrepreneurship is now available for spring 2018 adoption! The book is available free in various digital formats on the book’s homepage, and will be available in print-on-demand in December 2017. Lead editors Michelle Ferrier of Ohio University and Elizabeth Mays of the Rebus Community and Arizona State University worked with a large community of practice teaching the subject (20+ authors, 10 peer reviewers, 12 beta testers and an even larger community of open reviewers) to build the resource, which was tested in classrooms and received student feedback in Fall 2017. If you know anyone who teaches media innovation, journalism entrepreneurship, or business of journalism, please encourage them to take a look. Editors will continue to incorporate beta testing and other feedback into the book on an ongoing basis, and a second version, with additional chapters and sidebars, will be made available in Spring 2018.
This book has also been entered in the prestigious AEJMC Tankard Award competition, so watch this space!
Seeking Your Input on Accessibility Strategy Development
The Rebus Community is committed to accessibility in all the open textbook projects it supports. For us, open means inclusive, and accessibility is key to that. As part of our accessibility efforts, we have established a working group of experts to help us develop a comprehensive approach to ensuring our open textbooks meet the highest standards possible. As a first step, the working group conducted a review on a sample open textbook, which stood as a test case for typical accessibility problems. The results of that review have now been summarized in our accessibility strategy development document and have informed several recommendations for further action. We invite you to comment on this document by December 1. We will then incorporate feedback and release a public version of the accessibility strategy around December 15.
Thanks for Taking our Digital Reading Survey!
We’ve had more than 100 responses from librarians, faculty, publishers, instructional designers, and students to our survey on academic monographs. Thanks to all of you who participated! We are distilling the responses now, in preparation to release a public report of our findings, which will be available on the Rebus Foundation website in January 2018. If you would like to receive a copy of the report, please let us know.
Rebus Represents Open
Rebus Community staff have had a presence at a variety of open events this year. Here are some of the highlights:
- Open Education Conference: Hugh attended this year’s Open Ed conference in Anaheim, where he spoke about open textbooks, open collaboration, and what the Rebus Community has learned so far.
- OpenCon 2017: Zoe Wake Hyde represented Rebus at OpenCon in Berlin, a conference for the next generation of leaders in the Open movement. Highlights were an “unconference” session on making open textbooks, which attracted conference attendees ranging from experienced to those just dipping their toes into OER. One of the highlights was an exceptional panel on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in Open Research and Open Education. Zoe highly recommends watching the panel video.
- Accessibility Roundtable at UC Berkeley: Zoe also participated in an accessibility roundtable co-sponsored by Authors Alliance, the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology (BCLT), and Silicon Flatirons. Invited attendees discussed the challenges of creating accessible content and authoring tools and the importance of those to the full participation in the digital realm. A white paper expanding on the discussion will be published in the coming months.
- W3C Publishing Working Group: Baldur Bjarnasson has been involved in the W3C Publishing Working Group over the past year. The group is looking at the vision and technical challenges in implementing web publications on the open web.
Do you know of an event in 2018 that we should be at? Please let us know.
Like what we’re doing? Please get in touch if you’ve got any ideas, feedback or thoughts for us!