All the Right Connexions

Even though MIT's OpenCourseWare is better-known, Rice's Connexions programme is arguably a more innovative and thorough-going example of the open courseware concept. For a start, it's based on the open source Rhaptos sofware, whereas MIT's is proprietary. But Connexions is also going further in terms of re-inventing education.

So, as well as its open courseware, it is making materials available as print on demand books, that can be individually customised. It hopes that this move will enable it to become self-sufficient, helped along the way by another grant from the enlightened Hewlett Foundation, which is driving much of the best work in open access and open courseware:

Connexions' initial revenue streams will come from the sale of books. In one case, Connexions plans to found a University Press Consortium that allows member presses to offer print-on-demand publication of money-losing monographs that are academically important but which simply cost too much to publish. The model builds upon Rice's announcement in July that it would use Connexions to revive its own university press, which was shuttered in 1996. The reopened Rice University Press published its first title, "Art History and Its Publications in the Electronic Age," early this month (see http://cnx.org/content/col10376/1.1).

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Connexions also plans to develop a catalog of the 10 most-popular community college textbooks, which also will be free for online viewing and cost less than $30 when purchased as hardbound books.

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Connexions' final revenue-generating plan involves licensing its platform to companies for in-house corporate training. This model will allow companies to slash costs for updating printed materials, particularly for large product lines, and Connexions' robust translation features will allow companies to easily convert courses and texts into other languages, including Spanish, Chinese, Thai, Japanese and Italian.

Kudos to Richard Baraniuk for initiating what is proving to be a hugely ambitious project. I wish it well.

Making All the Right Connexions

A couple of months back I had the pleasure of interviewing Richard Baraniuk for an article about open content for LWN.net. As I wrote then:

Just as open source avoids re-inventing the wheel by building on existing code, so open courseware aims to save time, effort and money by making educational material freely available for others to re-use, extend and improve.

The first such project, Connexions, came from Rice University. It was the brainchild of Richard Baraniuk, professor of electrical engineering, who was directly inspired by the example of open source. Connexions uses a content creation platform called Rhaptos, which is released under the GNU GPL.

Connexions is a fascinating exercise in re-inventing university course materials, but Baraniuk told me that they were planning to go even further. Now Rice has announced that it is to use print-on-demand technologies to produce academic textbooks in a completely new way. As the press release explains:

Rice University's innovative Connexions today announced an on-demand printing agreement with QOOP Inc. that will allow students and instructors anywhere in the world to order high-quality, hardbound textbooks from Connexions - in most cases for less than $25.

The deal positions Connexions to take the lead in open-source textbook publishing as soon as it completes software needed to feed each of its titles to QOOP's on-demand publishing platform. Connexions plans to offer more than 100 titles for online purchase by year's end.

"From its inception, Connexions has used the Web to go beyond print," said Connexions founder Richard Baraniuk. "Connexions lets pupils and instructors make cross-disciplinary intellectual leaps with a simple mouse click, following knowledge wherever learning takes them.

"But being Web-based is also about access, and because our materials are freely available to everyone, we needed an easy, low-cost way to let people use a book if that's the medium they are most comfortable learning from," said Baraniuk, the Victor C. Cameron Professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering.

QOOP's on-demand service will allow Connexions users to order customized course guides and a variety of fully developed Connexions textbooks. Standard paperbacks will take just 3-5 days to produce and ship, and traditional hardbacks will take about a week to produce. QOOP ships directly to customers.

No other publisher of open-source educational content can match Connexions offerings. This is partly due to Connexions early adoption of Creative Commons open licenses. Because all content on the site is authored under these licenses, there are no copyright conflicts to negotiate.

Open content, open source - sounds like all the right connexions are being made.