@oct19-cohort, thanks to everyone who attended our first check-in today! It was fabulous to hear about the progress you’re all making on your projects. Since there were a few resources shared in the chat, I wanted to start a new topic where we could follow-up with the transcript and links.
Take a look at the full chat transcript, or refer to this list for a look at what was shared on today’s call:
The last event reminds me: We’re sending out a special edition of our newsletter for Open Education Week, which runs from March 2-6, and would love to highlight any of your events taking place! If you’re hosting or participating in an OEWeek event, just share a link to your event page with @LeighKP by Wednesday, Feb. 26, 2pm ET.
I also wanted to drop in a link to our handout on Review and Feedback, for those of you interested in resources on classroom review. Stay tuned for a link to our Office Hours recording on the same topic!
Finally, note that our next check-in will be on March 13, at 1pm ET on our usual link. I’ll be sure to send out a reminder a day or two prior. Feel free to share updates, ask questions, or more in the discussion space in the meantime!
@oct19-cohort — Reminder that our next check-in is taking place tomorrow, at 1pm ET on Zoom (at our standard link). I look forward to hearing what you’ve all been up to!
I’ll mention it during the session as well: we’ll do our best to accommodate and help as many of you may be working with your institutions to prepare for COVID-19. If anyone has any questions about logistics, please let us know. Our doors are open to help!
Hi @apurva–late notice, but I’m also not on the call today because of lot’s of emergency classes and meetings about our campus going online. I’ll post some updates next week!
We were a small group on the call today, and I heard a few good updates from Chloe, Alisa, MaryAnn, and Joan. Joe, sorry you had to drop off, but hopefully you can post an update below.
Our chat transcript is available, and I’ve put together a few notes from our session today:
We understand that many of you may be busy preparing at your institution, region, or home for COVID-19. Please take the time that you need. We’re here to make accommodations and answer questions around logistics that you may have. For now, our check-ins will continue as planned, with the next one scheduled for April 17, but we’re ready to reassess if necessary.
Our product team has released an update on our platform, and it comes with a new set of features! Check it what is new in our release notes and let us know if you have any feedback.
In your own time, could those of you in the @oct19-cohort who couldn’t attend today’s check-in possibly drop-in an update about your project in this thread? It’ll be nice to hear how things are going on your end.
We’ve received Table of Contents/Abstract comments from four of six external peer reviewers. Comments were largely positive and had some helpful bits. We told external reviewers about the purpose of the book and asked them to review the chapter titles/abstracts and asked if they had comments on topics that we missed. (Students (many of whom are the authors) in the Graduate Teaching Scholars program were previously invited to review the TOC and provide feedback.) External reviewer comments were helpful and indicated that we are headed in a good direction. We have some questions about the title of the book so we’ll need to further work on that.
This week we had two optional meetings with chapter authors in which we discussed writing-related questions (tone, features to include in each chapter, author agreement, and how we want to communicate as a group.)
The editorial team met today. We reviewed our overall editorial calendar, parts of which we let slide because of the Covid-19 pandemic. We set and will shortly announce author meeting dates for April & May. We hope to complete and share the author guidelines with authors next week.
Chapter authors have been asked to join the Rebus community. We would like to provide an overview of the platform (how to get started, how to best leverage the value of the platform as a communication and transparency tool, basic features, etc.) We have around 20 authors, some of whom will not able able to attend a live demo/ author meetings. We would love to invite you, @apurva or @zoe but we know that your time is also limited so we are wondering if there is a brief video or other introduction to using the Rebus community platform which we could share with authors. Does one exist? If not, is there a brief handout or “how to use this site best” page or guide available?
We are looking forward to checking in on April 17th. On a personal note: We are all well so far. Like everyone else all of our teaching and other work has been severely disrupted with moving everything online and closing everything else due to COVID-19, but we are well and very grateful for many things.
We look forward to hearing from the rest of the cohort as time allows.
Anita
I’m happy to hear that reviews have been largely favourable and helpful. It’s good that you were able to do a formal round of peer reviews after the internal feedback from the team during the earlier phases. I’m curious about what kind of title you land up with as you take into account the review comments.
It’s not surprising that timelines and deadlines have needed to be moved around. This is definitely acceptable and encouraged! I’m glad that your team is being understanding towards one another and working together to find ways to slowly gain momentum back on the project.
Your team seems set up well for the content creation work this month and next. I’m excited to see the authors join the platform! I would recommend sharing these two threads with anyone new to the platform:
Following a project (this is useful to understand the basics around the project homepage, and notification settings to receive messages from you or the other project leads)
If you’re planning on doing a demo of the platform, I would suggest taking a look at a video tour we had prepared for the platform. While we’ve made updates to the platform since the video was shot, it still contains useful information that you could mention during your own demo! I would particularly highlight the different blocks of your project homepage as ways to leverage transparency and public work, and possibly even look at other examples to inform authors why it is so important to communicate in the open. Here’s a recap of our marketing & communications session that talks a bit about the benefits of this open approach.
If there are any questions about the platform or community, we’re more than happy to answer them here. So even if we cannot attend your author meetings, we’re certainly able to keep an eye on updates or questions in your project discussion space and jump in when necessary.
I also look forward to chatting with you all next week. I’m glad you are all doing well (as I hope is the rest of the cohort). I’m sorry to hear that your work has been severely disrupted with the shift to online, but I hope that solutions are in place and that it is more manageable now.
@oct19-cohort I hope you are all keeping well! Our next check-in is this Friday, April 17, at 1pm ET on Zoom (at our standard meeting link). It’s been a bit longer than 4 weeks since our last call, so I’m looking forward to chatting with you all again and seeing how things are with everybody. I know that some of you won’t be able to make this session — we’ll try to get an update from your other representatives on the call, or connect with you here in the discussion afterwards.
I’ll write back here with a few updates after our call. See you soon!
Hi Apurva! I’m so sorry I missed today’s meeting. Time is playing tricks on me lately. I hope you will share what you discussed together and I look forward to our next meeting!
Thank you @oct19-cohort for coming to today’s check-in and sharing a bit about how you are doing, how your projects are progressing. It was nice to see so many of you after over a month. If any of you were not able to make this session, please reply to this thread and let us know how you are doing and share project updates (if you have any).
As I noted on the call, going forward, we are going to be taking some extra security measures with Zoom. So we will continue to use the same link, but will password-protect it. You will all have received a DM in the platform with the password. Please feel free to pass that along to anyone else on your project team who might not be in the platform.
As usual, I’ve saved the chat transcript from our conversation for you all to refer to. Below is a round-up of links shared:
Samantha @dannick also had a question for others on the call: does anyone have suggestions for ways that language instructors can engage their students and focus on conversation practice? I’ll suggest taking a look at how Português para Principiantes uses H5P interactive elements to assess students throughout the book. If anyone has other suggestions, please share them below!
Our next check-in will be on May 8, and I’ll be sure to send out a reminder before.
@oct19-cohort, it’s been nearly a month since we last met up, which means that our next check-in is round the corner. We’ll be meeting up this Friday, May 8, at 1pm ET at our usual Zoom link.
If you can’t make the session, please let us know by responding below. Take a moment to also share how you’ve been doing so far, and of course, anything that you want to mention about your project!
Hey Apurva! Looking forward to this week’s check-in. We are in the editing phase of our project at the moment and would love the opportunity to discuss. Thanks and talk soon!
Thank you @apurva, I won’t be able to make it today. I haven’t heard from @walcir.cardoso but hopefully he can join today.
On other notes, I have been reading up on Latex and accessible PDF, and making a tagged PDF so it can be read by screen readers, like @arwalz was talking about for her wonderful example Electromagnetics, Volume 2. This is all very new to me!
Thanks for letting us know, Chloe. Hopefully we can see you at our session next month! And of course, we’re happy to hear from Walcir, @Mike or @am.senecal if they can make it.
It’s nice to hear that you’ve been diving into more on Latex and tagging PDFs! There’s a lot to dig into there, so please feel free to share anything useful and interesting (or confusing) you find as you’re learning more about both concepts. We’re all ears!
Thank you for the reminder. Donna and I will unfortunately not be able to attend today. We are both fine but haven’t checked in for a couple weeks and are working on end of semester /end of year wrap up.
Authors are in a writing phase which is relatively quiet. I’ll plan to send a more detailed update after our next check in.
No worries Anita; it seems that many in the cohort are busy finishing up their semesters. I hope you both get some time to yourselves before the next one begins!
I look forward to the next update.
All is well on my end. I’ll follow-up with a recap of our session today soon!
@oct19-cohort thanks to those of you who could make it to our check-in last week! We were a small group, but got a chance to dive deep into project updates and questions (on encouraging editors, allocating funding, plagiarism, Rebus tools, informing others about open publishing). If you couldn’t join us, let us know how you’re doing and share any project details in this thread. We know that the past few months may have been slow for many of you and your projects, and that’s okay — you will all regain momentum in due course!
The check-ins are providing an opportunity for us to revisit old or discuss new challenges that you might be facing on your projects. If there’s anything that seems of interest for you, please let me know, and I can prepare a short session on these topics (perhaps even polling to see which to tackle sooner). This idea seemed to resonate with those on the call, and I’m curious to hear what everyone else thinks.
Please let me know!
There were a few resources shared in our chat transcript, which I’ll list out:
Open Publishing Fest - this is a great event to learn more about open publishing models, share your own projects, or feel inspired and motivated to keep doing what we’re all doing!
And for anyone who is looking for new things to bake, this cookie recipe suggested by @alazear!
Our next session is on June 5th, but I’ll be in touch sooner to touch base on any potential topics we can discuss during the session. Let me know if you have any suggestions.
We’re all ears!