@may20-cohort Huge thank you to everyone for coming to our first session yesterday! I really enjoyed getting to know each other and what each of you are working on (or working to support). Many of the ‘dream goals’ that you described also resonated with me! Below, I’ve included a brief recap of our call and a list of resources shared in the chat or mentioned on the call. I’ve also included the chat transcript.
Lesson Recap
Today’s main focus was to get to know one another and the Rebus approach and tools. We asked each other to share some information about our projects and aspirations. If you couldn’t make the session, please feel free to respond below with your introduction! 
We also spent a bit of time discussing Rebus’ collaborative approach to publishing, and how a larger community around a resource can not only make it stronger, but also help maintain it down the line. Our approach hinges on thinking about marketing, accessibility, formatting, and more at each stage to really harness the global potential of OER and what it can do. And these stages can be flexible, and play out in different ways on your projects — that’s what the model is built to do! We also discussed how being transparent about the process of creation can invite others to contribute and be involved in projects, whether in big ways or small. This helps reduce duplication of work and instead lets us combine our efforts!
The project homepages in Rebus are a great way to be public about the work you’re doing, so this week, if possible, I encourage one person on each project to set up their homepage and let me know when complete. We’ll fill in more of this information next week at our session on project scoping and framing. As far as logistics go, what you can expect for our next session is to spend the initial 20 minutes on project updates, 40 minutes on our lesson on project scoping, and another 30 minutes to discuss how this can be applied to your project.
The remainder of the session covered the Rebus platform (where this recap is posted) and the different areas that you will likely spend your time, namely, the cohort discussion space and your project home. We also talked about the cohort tag (@may20-cohort) and how this can be used to notify everyone in the cohort, and looked at the Direct Messaging functionality on the platform. We ended our discussion with questions on the platform (around following projects), tools more generally (including Pressbooks), and the hosting options for final projects.
Chat Transcript & Resources
I’ve saved a copy of the chat transcript for reference, and also put together a list of the resources/links that were shared in the chat or mentioned during the call. If you would like something redacted from this transcript, please let me know!
Here is the list of resources shared:
- The Rebus platform
- Cohort discussion space
- The May 20 Cohort syllabus
- Memorandum of Understanding (please read through and confirm your agreement if you haven’t already)
- Introduction to Community Psychology textbook
- Following a project (in the Rebus User Guide)
- Pressbooks
- Webinar: Music to Our Ears: A fair use deep dive into using music in OER
- Creating a Project Homepage (try your hand at this for your project if someone hasn’t already)
- Mind the Gap overview of publishing tools