i do totally understand if the rebus focus is on books and ebooks. but broadly, im curious about oer and video.
is there a rebus-like group / organisation / effort towards oer video production (or video design / scripting) or is that something rebus might want to be involved with as a side effort?
Hi @figosdev! At the moment, we don’t have any active work underway directed at video production, but the process, tools & resources we’re developing could be adapted to any kind of content, really! As it stands, though, our focus is really on long form texts, though as I think Apurva has mentioned in another exchange with you, we take a broad view of what a textbook can be 
@zoe thats fantastic, thank you.
i am beginning to learn that oer is broader than i thought, and that makes me very happy. i certainly thought it could be broader, but im glad that im not the only one.
@figosdev Absolutely!! As we see it, if all we do is replicate the existing system with open licenses slapped on everything, we really haven’t tapped the full potential of OER. There’s lots of exciting work and thinking happening around these questions, so you’re in good company. I think you’ve seen @sujones’ project on cognitively accessible maths, and we have another that’s developing a method for teaching sight reading for guitar using both text and video. More and more, people are approaching creation with a broader view of what’s possible, but we also have to remember that not all students have the same level of access to technology, so it’s a balance.
@zoe said in oer video?:
we also have to remember that not all students have the same level of access to technology, so it’s a balance.
true, though its funny how that works out. i setup computers for a homeless shelter where smartphones and laptops were common, but people were sometimes living in tents. there was no way to carry textbooks. people came into town to use the internet, socialise and get food.
one of the projects im most inspired by is one-laptop-per-child, where one of the tricks of the entire project was that you could make teaching materials accessible (and up to date) without trying to ship paper books around all the time.
in practice, paper textbooks are pretty expensive and likely to be out of date. in developing nations, phones are more common than laptops. it might be more economical (in terms of grants) to get digital technology to places than books.
the biggest problem really is powering them, thats a significant one.
obviously im not disputing anything youve said-- youtube is not ideal for low-bandwidth connections, and olpc has worked out ways to transfer files using buckets of usb drives. (its like a delivery service that collects usb drives, fills orders online and brings them to the owners again. sort of like sending a self-addressed-stamped-envelope to a mail-order school.)
i love paper, paper will always have a place-- and i try to design pretty much everything for older computers. i have a machine sitting next to me (in standby) thats at least 10 years old. it runs the icecat browser, but not very well.
the most important thing, in my opinion, is to design things that work on simpler browsers. some “tablet-friendly” designs are really bloated and obnoxiously slow/tedious compared to “desktop-friendly” predecessors, and we need to knock it off with designs that assume someone has 4 or 8 core processors (my fastest machine doesnt have that many, and instead of customising the machine ive customised all of the software to be lighter. except the stupid-- stupid, stupid browser.)
@figosdev For sure, it’s never a question of discounting one (digital) in favour of the other (print) or vice versa, but acknowledging all the complexity you describe when designing content. And even that dichotomy is inaccurate - even the difference between online & offline digital access is just as significant and each serve a different purpose/audience. I’ve heard of similar USB delivery services for offline access - so awesome!
We’re lucky to have a developer who thinks about a lot of these things, and the browser issue you mentioned is front of mind for him/us, too. It’s been an interesting process to manage as we create our own platform. Anyway, glad to hear others are on the same page - it’s sure fun figuring it all out 