By the end of the session, participants will be able to: Explain how the Rebus Community can facilitate collaboration on OER Evaluate potential benefits and challenges with this model, and offer possible ways to address the latter.
There are many people scattered across the globe with the skills needed to create excellent open educational resources; what many of us lack is the time to do it all ourselves. A number of ways to address this situation through collaborative creation of OER have emerged, including in-person and virtual sprints. The Rebus Community is facilitating another way: a kind of crowdsourcing model for students, faculty, staff, librarians, and others to get together online to create OER, with commitments ranging from a few minutes to a few months (or longer). One of these projects is a series of open textbooks for Introduction to Philosophy, which has nine planned volumes, each with a separate editor, and each with between 5 and 10 chapter authors. There are also others involved in the project, doing work from peer review to graphic design.
In this session Hugh McGuire from Rebus Community will speak about the collaborative open textbook building practice Rebus helps facilitate, and Christina Hendricks, lead editor for the Introduction to Philosophy series, will given an overview of how the project has evolved and some lessons learned. At least 10 minutes will be devoted to discussion: Participants will be asked to contribute their thoughts (possibly through an online platform such as Poll Everywhere) on potential challenges they can see with projects like this, and ideas on how to address them. We will also discuss together the potential for this kind of publishing model to address sustainability issues around OER.
