6/2/2008 Bridget Maiellaro, ECE Illinois
Through the Web site known as Connexions, University of Illinois ECE professors, faculty members, and graduate students are able to upload their learning materials, such as textbooks or handouts, onto the Internet and make the information available faster and for free.
Written by Bridget Maiellaro, ECE Illinois
Some University of Illinois ECE professors, faculty members, and graduate students have begun to teach students using a new tool. Through the Web site known as Connexions (http://cnx.org), they are able to upload their learning materials, such as textbooks or handouts, onto the Internet and make the information available faster and for free.
Connexions, a non-profit open education project Web site established in 1999, aims to reinvent how people write, edit, publish, and use textbooks and other learning materials, according to ECE alumnus and creator of the site Richard Baraniuk (PhD ’92). Currently a professor at Rice University, Baraniuk sought a way to produce learning materials for his electrical engineering students more quickly.
"I was frustrated with teaching an electrical engineering course and thought about writing a new textbook," Baraniuk said. "But after thinking about it, I realized that there were major problems with textbooks." He said the problems included the cost of the books, the way they presented users with only one way of learning, and the time it takes books to get published and revised.
Through Connexions, authors are able to upload textbooks or other learning materials as individual files called "modules" when they see fit. After a variety of modules are on the site, they can be grouped together to form a "collection" or course. Members of the Web site are also able to build a collection from any mixture of modules and create finished products, such as e-learning Web courses, CD-ROMs, and printed books. Overall, Connexions allows all users to contribute, use, and customize information for free.
"The main reason is that I believe that knowledge and education are a public good that should be freely available to everyone worldwide," Baraniuk said.
Currently, Connexions receives more than 20 million hits per month, with more than 750,000 visitors from more than 200 countries, Baraniuk said. As of March, Connexions had more than 5,000 modules and more than 300 collections. The most active content development areas currently include music, engineering, physics, chemistry, and history.
Named Connexions to show the interconnections between ideas and the goal of connecting people from different communities behind those ideas, the site includes materials for education from kindergarten to high school, community colleges, universities, continuing education, and industrial training settings. In addition, people all over the world use Connexions (50 percent from the United States), so information has been added in more than 20 languages, including Spanish, Chinese, Danish, Thai, and Japanese.
ECE Professor Douglas L Jones is one of a number of educators at Illinois who use the site. Jones learned about the site from Baraniuk, his PhD student from 1988 to 1992, shortly after it was created. At the time, Connexions was only used by Rice University professors, making Jones one of the first external professors to post his notes and other materials from three of his courses (ECE 101, ECE 420, and ECE 541) on the site. His goal is to eventually get all of his courses on the site.
"The electronic method is faster, and since it’s open source, you’re able to specialize it for your own institution. You need to have both to make it viable," Jones said. "It’s not legally allowed to change things in a commercial book to have it make sense for your own lab because of copyright infringement. Connexions has a common mark-up language so everything has the same format. It’s easy and legal to mix and match information."
Even though authors submit their work on Connexions, they are clearly identified and still retain their copyrights. Other authors are able to use materials available to compile or change content, as long as they attribute the original author.
Jones said that one of the major benefits of using Connexions is that he doesn’t have to write a whole book himself. Instead, he modifies what is already available, adding his information.
"It’s a community-written book," he said. "The information comes from different places but it’s all in the same area… It’s a collaborative process. It’s a revolving team of people who create and update. I couldn’t have done it all by myself. That’s the whole point of Connexions."
The site also enables users to create their own book by combining a variety of work and having it printed on demand. The book arrives the next day by courier. While there are fees for printing the work in book format, Baraniuk said they are cheaper than buying a textbook from the store. For instance a 300 page text book would cost $120 in the store and $30 via Connexions. However, if users prefer to print out individual pieces of information, they can make PDF files and hit print.
"The ability to print real paper textbooks and to do quality control enables Connexions to be useful to a broad class of users, from professors to community college instructors to students to life-long learners around the globe," Baraniuk said.
While Jones said he does not believe Connexions or future open-ended source Web sites will replace books, such as the Harry Potter series or general subject areas, he feels it will take the place of texts in specialized labs and advanced topics, where the fields constantly change.
"There is no point in trying another way," he said. "In these cases, it’s clearly the superior model. It will quickly come to dominate. It’s the only viable way to produce those books."
As a way to ensure the quality of content on the site, individuals, institutions, professional societies, and others are able to set up their own review processes. In so doing, users are directed through a list of content that has been determined as "high quality" by a variety of reviewing communities. People are able to develop their own peer review process so they are able to focus on the content in the repository that they think is important. The Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), the world's leading professional organization for the advancement of technology, and the National Council of Professors of Educational Administration (NCPEA), an organization committed to serving the interests and needs of professors of educational administration and practicing school leaders, are two of these reviewing communities.
"It’s a way of putting their stamp of approval on material for quality. They review and approve for others to use," Jones said.
Jones said that since he has used Connexions, he has recommended it to anyone who teaches a lab course, including his colleagues from Illinois as well as friends from other universities.
"What we do here has been able to help and influence people around the country. We think we do it the right way, and it’s had a positive impact," he said. "As other places contribute, I make use of the material that they put up, and students can make more use of the information without me having to write it. The more people involved, the more value there will be for everybody."