Iowa OER is starting a new series of monthly posts highlighting resources available to the community! These blog posts will highlight OER, webinars, communities, and platforms that you can use in your open education journey. Our first resource highlight is the Rebus Community.

“Rebus Community is an initiative of the Rebus Foundation, a Canadian registered charity. We support a model of publishing that is collaborative, efficient, and open.”

The Rebus Community has an excellent website with built-in features to help OER authors and program managers handle every step of the content creation process. In addition to guidebooks, the Rebus Community website also provides a networking platform to connect OER projects with contributors, peer reviewers, and potential adopters.

When you scroll down the homepage for the Rebus Community (rebus.community), you see a selection of cards highlighting sections of the website: a Getting Started guide, the Open Textbook Directory, information about the community’s Textbook Success Program, the Contributor Marketplace, and more. We will be focusing on two resources in this month’s blog post: the Open Textbook Directory and Contributor Marketplace.

• Contributor Marketplace: Browse through open textbook projects that are currently in development, projects with open calls for participants, questions about future projects, and other conversations on this forum for OER contributors. Useful for those looking for a community of practice, a project to support, or just hoping for some advice. One forum post we saw was asking for advice on a book title! No question is too small.
• Searchable Open Textbook Directory: Search for open textbook projects by their subject, stage of development, or needs. An incredibly useful tool for finding soon-to-be-released OER projects and projects in development which might require additional support. We recommend not using the Subjects dropdown, since it is an in-depth list of subjects and some may have no corresponding texts. Instead, browse through what’s currently in production or share your own project to locate collaborators!

The Rebus Community is a great one-stop shop for your OER authoring needs. If you know someone who is looking for co-authors or peer reviewers for their open textbook project, we recommend that they check out Rebus for a head-start on promoting their work.

Thank you for reading and check back next month for another resource highlight!