Connexions — an Open Education Resource

If you want to cus­tomize some lec­ture notes, cre­ate a text­book  or col­lect some spe­cial read­ings for your class, Con­nex­ions might help.  It is rather like Open Courseware, but it is a wiki text­book prod­uct, and devel­oped in mod­ules.  Prof. Peter M. Grant from the Uni­ver­sity of Edin­burgh gave a pre­sen­ta­tion about it at the Friend Cen­ter yes­ter­day.  It was devel­oped at Rice Uni­ver­sity but now is inde­pen­dently run in Hous­ton, TX, being funded by Heulett.  It’s con­tent is con­tin­u­ally growing…recently con­sist­ing of 500 col­lec­tions, courses, or books, and 10,500 mod­ules or chap­ters of 4–8 pages.  It oper­ates under a Cre­ative  Com­mons license.  147 coun­tries are involved.  The most preva­lent lan­guage is Span­ish, but there is also Eng­lish, Thai, Japan­ese and Chi­nese.  All sub­jects are present, even though it was first devel­oped as a Com­mu­ni­ca­tions and Dig­i­tal Sig­nal Pro­cess­ing (DSP) resource.  Intro­duc­tion to Music The­ory is a pop­u­lar text avail­able at Con­nex­ions.  How­ever, ~65% cov­ers sci­ence and tech­nol­ogy.  Any­one can con­tribute, become an author, and most con­tri­bu­tions are peer reviewed at some point.  “Lenses” for qual­ity con­trol and review are cen­tered at IEEE, Rice and IMS, and other insti­tu­tions and indi­vid­u­als depend­ing on the sub­jects.  One very cool appli­ca­tion is Lab­VIEW which dis­plays active ana­lyt­ics, for exam­ple, the graph­i­cal out­put read­ings result­ing from dif­fer­ent input fil­ter­ing devices in elec­tron­ics.   (More about Lab­VIEW. ) XML is used to store con­tent, and texts are eas­ily uploaded from Microsoft Word or LaTeX. 

Infor­ma­tion about the pre­sen­ta­tion and Prof. Grant which was spon­sored by: The Keller Cen­ter for Inno­va­tion in Engi­neer­ing Edu­ca­tion.