Connexions Overview

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ConnexionsOverview
Rich Baraniuk Rice University cnx.rice.edu
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Goals

• Hewletts goal for the Educational Programs
  Technology priority area is,
• Using technology to improve access to exemplary
  educational content for schools, colleges,
  universities, and individuals throughout the
  world
• The Connexions goal
• Provide and maintain a commmons where indivuduals
  and communities create and freely share knowledge

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Connexions Objectives

• The following are identified as the objectives
  that will fulfill the goal, thus driving the
  projects activities
• Provide a content commons of free educational
  materials
• Facilitate content re-use
• Provide the necessary toos to grow and access the
  commons of knowledge
• Ensure sustainability of this resource into the
  future
• Promote participation in growing and using
  knowledge

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Strategy

• The following characteristics describe the
  Connexions strategy used for achieving the
  projects objectives
• Modularity
• Collaboration
• Open Licensing
• Open Participation

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Connexions
Authors
Module
Instructors
Content commons
Students
Courses
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Connexions Activities

• Talks today will demonstrate how the strategies
  have been followed to date, work in progress, and
  the plans for the future
• Seed communities go deep in a few areas to gain
  global recognition as a quality source of
  educational content in these areas (Sound
  Reasoning demo, Tony Brandt)
• Explore Intellectual Property (IP) Issues (Chris
  Keltys work)
• Design and Build a robust, scalable architecture
  for sharing knowledge (Software development
  activities, Brent Hendricks)
• Build towards sustainability (Business faculty
  advisement by Paul Dholakia)
• Future support for growing the content commons
  and ensuring quality (Future development plans,
  Geneva Henry)
• Track the users and usage of Connexions
  (Educational assessment and usage data, Janice
  Bordeaux and Ross Reedstrom)

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Where we are today
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Technology and Tools

• Content modules encoded in XML
• Database to organize modules (eventually
  distributed)
• Authoring tools and workgroups to facilitate
  collaboration
• Course Composer to assemble modules
• Annotation to personalize modules
• Roadmap to navigate and explore
• All tools free and open source
• Tools in live use at a range of institutions
  globally
• Full Version 1.0 launch February 2004

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Content Commons Growth

• Modules in the commons
• 1650 modules
• 35 courses (February 2004)
• ECE, CS, bio-info,
• math, nanotech,
• physics, stats,
• botany, music,
• from authors
• worldwide

• Hits on cnx.rice.edu in Q4 2002 6-8000
  hits/day
• Q4 2003 120-150,000 hits/day

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Legally Sharing Content?

• Current IP regime discourages sharing

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Open Content Licensing

• Current IP regime discourages sharing
• Creative Commons Licenses
• common legal vocabulary for sharing content
• Sharing, (re)use requires that IP be integrated
  into content
• Recent developments
• Berlin Declaration (October 2003)
• Peru, Brazil, Argentina, Mexico open-source
  initiatives
• Publisher collaborators
• Kinkos, Cambridge University Press

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Prototype Communities

• Cross-institutional in Digital Signal Processing
  (DSP)
• Rice, Illinois, Ohio State, Georgia Tech,
  Michigan, Polytechnic, Cambridge
• Ecole Polytechnique, ENST, ENS-Lyon, INRIA
  (France), EPFL (Switzerland)
• Texas Instruments and National Instruments
• spontaneous contributions from NTNU (Norway),
  Univ. Verona (Italy)
• Complete Rice Electrical and Computer Engineering
  core undergrad curriculum
• goal 15 interlinked courses with prerequisites
• Bioinformatics (Rice, Baylor, MD Anderson, UH)
• genetics, statistics, computer science,
  bioengineering,
• Botany/Biodiversity
• Music appreciation and theory (K-12 and college)
• Computer science, mathematics, nanotechnology,
  civil engineering, physics, complex systems,
  UNESCO,