If you read our last update, you’ll know that a lot has been going on here at Rebus, with a great deal of thinking, planning, and development for our future. In about a week, we’ll announce the next incarnation of the Rebus Community platform, a renovation that we’re excited to show off. It’s the first step in improving the resources, tools, models, and practices from our previous release, and adding a much-needed set of communications features that will support the community exchanges we want to enable.
This is the first step of many, and we’ll keep you updated over the coming months as things develop. In the not-too-distant future, you’ll be able to create a dedicated homepage for your open textbook project, leverage new models for building and managing teams, and connect with specific communities around a subject area. In the meantime, the platform will give you spaces to brainstorm content, gather interested contributors, and learn and share the practices of publishing open educational resources.
We want you to know that your enthusiasm has been incredibly gratifying, giving us all the momentum and confidence to keep Rebus Community evolving. Dozens of you have lined up over the past months to launch new projects. It has motivated us in our efforts to solve the limitations on capacity, and soon we’ll be opening the doors to all of you!
We are particularly pleased that these changes will allow everyone to use the Rebus Community platform instead of just a few select teams. As this community becomes more dynamic and self-supporting, helping and guiding each other, the capacity for publishing becomes (almost) limitless. So get ready to answer questions and find collaborators, offer help and ideas, and give feedback in a collaborative and transparent way. That is what the Rebus Community is about: fostering your expertise and knowledge, your advice and skills, your experiences and enthusiasm, and helping it to circulate ever more freely (or ‘openly’, if you will!)
We’ve always believed strongly in the value of making visible the work of publishing open textbooks. It allows us to learn from each other, capture that learning as a living resource that anyone can access and expand on, avoid duplicating efforts, demystify the publishing process, find more ways to collaborate, and work together to shape the future of OER creation. We, as a community (that means you and us), are driven by our shared belief in improving access to and the quality of education through open practices.