Education
Open Course Library Launches 1st 42 Courses
On Monday, the Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges (SBCTC) released the first 42 of the state’s high-enrollment 81 Open Course Library courses. The remaining 39 courses will be finished by 2013. Funded by the Washington State Legislature and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Open Course Library joins the global open educational resources (OER) movement, and adheres to SBCTC’s open policy, which requires that all materials created through system grants be openly licensed for the public to freely use, adapt and distribute.
All courses are available under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 unported license (CC-BY).
The first 42 courses are available in multiple technical formats including:
- Common Course Cartridges and ANGEL course exports hosted on Connexions.
- Guest login to preview and copy parts of the courses:
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username: guest_ocl
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password: ocl
- HTML via a partnership with the Saylor Foundation (most translations are still under development).
Michael Kenyon’s students at Green River Community College used to pay nearly $200 for a new pre-calculus textbook. Now they pay only $20 for a book – or use it online for free. Kenyon’s pre-calculus textbook (CC BY SA) was written by community college faculty David Lippman and Melonie Rasmussen, who teach at Pierce College Fort Steilacoom. “We looked at a lot of textbooks,” Kenyon said. “There are some people who think this is the best book out there.”
“The courses were created with the needs of Washington’s college students in mind,” said Tom Caswell, SBCTC Open Education Policy Associate. “And with the idea we would share the courses with the world.”
Each course was developed and peer reviewed by a team of instructors, instructional designers and librarians. Use of the course materials is optional, but many faculty and departments are already moving to adopt them.
According to an informal study by the Student Public Interest Research Groups (PIRGs), the Open Course Library could save students as much as $41.6 million on textbooks annually if adopted at all of Washington’s community and technical colleges. The study also estimates that the 42 faculty course developers will save students $1.26 million by using the materials during the 2011-2012 school year, which alone exceeds the $1.18 million cost of creating the 42 courses. “These savings will not only help Washington’s students afford college, but clearly provide a tremendous return on the original investment,” said Nicole Allen, Textbook Advocate for the Student PIRGs.
Justin Hamilton, press secretary for the U.S. Department of Education, said the Washington state effort was groundbreaking for the nation. “Lowering college costs increases a student’s ability to take more courses, finish their degree on time, and enter the workforce prepared for success in a global economy. That’s not just good for them, it’s good for the country.”
“It really is the beginning of the end of closed, expensive, proprietary commercial textbooks that are completely disconnected from today’s reality,” said Rep. Reuven Carlyle (D-Seattle) of Washington State’s 36th District, a champion of the Open Course Library and OER. “This is a significant state investment in this era of massive budget cuts. We had little choice but to seize the opportunity of this crisis to challenge the status quo of the old-style cost models in both K-12 and higher education.”
4 Comments »“Python for Informatics” Open Textbook Remixed in 11 Days
Chuck Severance, clinical professor at the University of Michigan’s School of Information, recently published a new textbook in 11 days because he was able to remix an existing textbook. The book, Python for Informatics: Exploring Information, is currently being used in his winter semester Networked Computing course. The textbook is based on the openly licensed book Think Python: How to Think like a Computer Scientist by Allen B. Downey. Students are able to take advantage of the University Library’s Espresso Book Machine to print on-demand copies for approximately $10. Python for Informatics is available under a CC BY-SA license.
Severance explains, “the book is a cool example of a situation where I’ve finally got to the ‘remixing’ bit of the Open promise.” The first 10 chapters are done and eight more are planned for completion by April 2010. Read more of Chuck’s thoughts about remixing an open book.
Creating this open textbook was a part of a larger effort by Chuck to support his course with openly licensed content, and current versions of lecture slides and videos are published via the PythonLearn website. In a past iteration of the course, Chuck went through the dScribe process developed by Open.Michigan to create an OER version of SI 502, available under a CC BY license.
1 Comment »CA Free Digital Textbook Initiative Launches Phase 2
Many of you have heard about California’s Free Digital Textbook Initiative that launched last spring, which called for submissions of free digital textbooks in math and science for use by the state’s schools. Of the 16 textbooks submitted last year, 15 are openly licensed under one of the Creative Commons licenses—and all 10 that passed 90% of CA’s state standards are CC licensed.
In addition to individuals, the CK-12 Foundation, Curriki, and Connexions submitted open textbooks on subjects like Algebra, Calculus, Biology, Chemistry, Geometry, Trigonometry, and various other -ometries. You can check out the full textbook list and standards reviews at the California Learning Resource Network (CLRN).
Now, the Governor and his constituents are launching Phase 2 of the Initiative, calling this time for “content developers to submit high school history-social science and higher-level math course textbooks for review against California’s academic content standards.” From the press release,
“Resources like digital textbooks play a critical role in our 21st century educational landscape, and expanding my first-in-the-nation initiative will provide local school districts additional high-quality free resources to help prepare California’s students to compete in the global marketplace,” said Governor Schwarzenegger. “I urge content developers to jump on board this second phase and submit social science and advanced math material to help ensure California’s shift to a more advanced and cost-effective education system continues.”
Phase 2 is accepting submissions on a rolling basis, so if you (or your project) have an open textbook completed or in the works, make sure the CC license info is marked up correctly and submit it to the CLRN website. For more on licensing, visit creativecommons.org/about/licenses.
1 Comment »CC Talks With: CK-12 Foundation’s Neeru Khosla on Open Textbooks
Back in March, we were so excited about the new Physics Flexbook aligned to Virginia’s state standards that we had to catch up with the foundation that helped to make it possible. The obvious choice was Neeru Khosla, co-founder of the CK-12 Foundation, “a non-profit organization with a mission to reduce the cost of textbook materials for the K-12 market both in the U.S. and worldwide.” The Flexbook is their web-based platform for open textbooks (openly licensed via CC BY-SA) which maximizes and enhances collaboration across district, county, and state lines. In fact, their use is not even limited by country, since CC licenses are global and non-exclusive. Anyone can collaborate, improve, and iterate without having to ask. “The good thing about that is we don’t have to tell people what they can do or cannot do. The power of the system is that it is useable under any condition. All you have to do is use it.”
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CC Talks With: University of Michigan Library
Over the past year, the University of Michigan Library has shown itself to be particularly sensible in regards to open content licensing, the public domain, and issues of copyright in the digital age. The U-M Library has integrated public domain book machines, adopted CC licensing for their content, and independently had their Copyright Specialist, Molly Kleinman, articulate the importance of proper attribution in using CC licenses. We recently caught up with Molly to learn more about these efforts – primarily how they came to be and the results they have yielded – as well as discuss CC’s place in educational institutions at large and how CC and Fair Use interact in the academic sphere.
Book, Suzanne Chapman | CC BY-NC-SA
What is your role at the University of Michigan Library? How does the University Library interact with the rest of the University?
I’m the University Library’s copyright specialist. I provide copyright and publishing assistance for faculty, students, researchers, staff, and librarians throughout the University of Michigan, and occasionally to the community at large. I handle questions on both sides of the copyright universe: people come to me as users of copyrighted works and also as creators with concerns about their own rights. At a university just about everybody is both a user and a creator, so I think it’s important to promote a balanced perspective on copyright. A big part of my job is teaching workshops and providing one-on-one consultations about copyright and scholarly publishing basics. I work with librarians all over campus to raise awareness about topics like fair use, Open Access, and author rights. I also support a number of the Library’s activities, including our institutional repository Deep Blue, the Scholarly Publishing Office, and Special Collections exhibits. People always ask if I’m an attorney… I’m not. I’m a librarian by training, and have a background in publishing. A law degree is useful when dealing with copyright, and it’s certainly necessary when you’re providing legal advice, but in many other situations it’s not essential. Copyright is messy and confusing and it makes a lot of people nervous and scared. Approaching these issues as a librarian allows me to explain things in “human readable” language instead of legalese. My goal is to demystify the law and empower students and faculty to advocate for their rights as both users and creators.
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Clivir
Clivir, a learning community site that allows users to post lessons of any and all types, just added support for CC licensing. The site already has amassed a large amount of teachable knowledge and by adding CC licensing options Clivir are giving users the ability to keep this knowledge open, shareable, and reusable (depending on which license is indicated).
Clivir have a released all of their own lessons under a CC BY-SA license, setting a strong example for the rest of their community to follow suit. While the ability to filter lessons by license choice is unfortunately not available yet, it is still great to see CC licenses integrated into communities like Clivir that pride group collaboration and collective knowledge.
No Comments »The Legal Education Commons
The Legal Education Commons launched yesterday with open access to over 700,000 federal court decisions. The LEC is an “open, searchable collection of resources designed specifically for use in legal education.” It is made possible by a collaboration between the Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction (CALI) and Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. From the press release:
“All teachers of law have materials and notes they use in teaching,” says John Mayer, CALI Executive Director. “Many freely share their materials with colleagues, but there has never been a singular searchable, taggable space to serve that function for the entire legal academy,” he explains, “until now.”
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While the LEC opens with an extensive collection of court cases and images, it can expand its collection of resources only through contributions and donations from the legal education community.
CALI implores faculty and staff at CALI member schools to share any files from personal collections that may facilitate learning amongst the legal education community. “Especially as we increasingly garner more participation and sharing from legal educators,” says Mr. Mayer, “the Legal Education Commons will be a great, non-commercial tool for those who are both teaching and learning the law.”
All material in the Legal Education Commons is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution Share-alike license (CC BY-SA), making it interoperable with a great deal of other open educational resources.
1 Comment »CC Talks With: Architecture for Humanity
Architecture for Humanity is a California-based non-profit organization aimed at encouraging architects and designers to seek architectural solutions to humanitarian crisis.
Launched in 1999 from a single laptop computer, Architecture for Humanity has spread into a global movement with local chapters around the world engaging talented young architects to rethink the mission of their profession. Architecture for Humanity hosts open design competitions for such projects as Transitional Housing for Returning Refugees in Kosovo, Mobile Health Clinics for Sub-Saharan Africa and a Sports Facility and HIV/AIDS Outreach Center in South Africa. Currently, Architecture for Humanity is providing design services and funding for reconstruction in Tsunami and Katrina affected regions.
Architecture for Humanity use the Creative Commons Developing Nations License on some of their designs. The CC Developing Nations license allows anyone in a developing country to freely use a copyrighted work whilst allowing a licensor to retain full copyright in the developed world.
In 2006, Executive Director and Co-founder Cameron Sinclair was awarded this year’s TEDPrize and with his “Wish” is developing an open source humanitarian design network to provide a global platform for designers to collaborate and develop projects to solve humanitarian issues.
Kathryn Frankel of Creative Commons met up with Cameron to learn more about Architecture for Humanity (“AFH”) and their experience in using Creative Commons licenses.
Creative Commons (“CC”): What is AFH’s mission?
Cameron Sinclair (“CS”): Architecture for Humanity was founded to promote architectural and design solutions to global, social and humanitarian crises. Through competitions, workshops, educational forums, partnerships with aid organizations and other activities, Architecture for Humanity creates opportunities for architects and designers from around the world to help communities in need. We believe that where resources and expertise are scarce, innovative, sustainable and collaborative design can make a difference.
CC: What are AFH’s current projects?
CS: We’re working on a health center in Tanzania. We’re doing new housing construction and rehabilitation of Katrina affected homes in the Gulf Coast as well as an art center and residence in the lower ninth district of New Orleans. Post tsunami, we’re doing a number of community buildings in Sri Lanka and India. We’re still in the building process of the Siyathemba soccer field project in South Africa. We’ve also just released our book, Design Like You Give A Damn, which is intended to bring the best of humanitarian architecture and design to the printed page, and consists of a collection of innovative projects from around the world that demonstrate the power of design to improve lives.
CC: How does AFH use Creative Commons’ licenses?
CS: We use the Developing Nations license for the designs of our buildings. Once the first prototype building is completed, we can essentially give away the designs to other communities in other developing nations.
Licenses are granted in the designers’ names. This actually came out of a project we did, the architect felt that by doing the project, he would lose the design. So half of it is a reassurance, the other half is to give architects the confidence to actually do pro bono work and not feel that their creativity will be given away.
CC: Why did AFH choose to adopt the Developing Nations license?
CS: Because the focus of our organization is to provide design services to communities where resources are scare, in many instances, we’re working in developing countries. By using the license, we can assure the architect that we’re protecting their intellectual property rights. This works in both directions, not only benefiting western designers but also local architects; a local architect may come with a scheme that works well in their country but it could also be marketed in the West.
CC: Has there been much reaction by the architectural community to your decision to CC license your works?
CS: I think it’s been positive. We’ve spent a lot of time explaining what the license does. This is a brand new concept within the industry. We’ve initially just been using licenses for our own projects. If a more robust version comes out, we can promote it more broadly. One of the issues the license would need to address is liability. Architects are licensed professionals and by sharing their design concepts they are opening themselves up to lawsuits should someone else adopt the design. In architecture, there’s not really a Good Samaritan’s law so maybe this can be an alternative—a way of allowing architects to share their ideas without sharing the liability should someone adapt the idea in a structurally unsound way without their knowledge.
CC: How do you think CC licenses can benefit the architectural and humanitarian design community?
CS: By engaging more people in getting involved in these issues, CC licenses could act as a platform, like a legal standard, that designers could work from. At the moment, the industry is in a very gray area and nobody knows what belongs to who, who’s really the designer, who’s liable. CC licensing could clear that up.
No Comments »CC Talks With: DigiBarn
The DigiBarn is a computer museum located in a 90-year-old barn in California’s Santa Cruz Mountains. It is also an online repository of Creative Commons-licensed photos, video, audio, and technical documentation that tell the history of personal computing. The DigiBarn’s collections include small and big computers, game systems, software, and schwag.
We recently spoke with the DigiBarn’s curator, Bruce Damer about the museum and its use of CC licensing.
Creative Commons: What is the DigiBarn project? How did it start?
Bruce Damer: The DigiBarn is a large physical collection of computing artifacts that is housed in a barn in the Santa Cruz Mountains above Silicon Valley in Northern California. The DigiBarn is also a sprawling cyber-collection at digibarn.com, which represents both physical artifacts and thousands of community contributions that tell the story of the invention of personal computing, the graphical user interface, and the digital lifestyle. We go beyond just giving the specs for a given computer to weaving together the stories of those who built the industry. We also showcase all the ephemera — from company t-shirts to software to internal prototypes.
I started collecting this history while working with Xerox and Xerox PARC in the 1980s. I formally commissioned the physical museum in 2001 with the help of my friend and neighbor Allan Lundell, a well known video chronicler of Valley history and the first west coast editor of Byte magazine. Behind the project are literally thousands of contributors and hundreds of volunteers who have emptied their garages, told us their stories, and done heavy lifting for the physical and online exhibits.
CC: What are your goals for the DigiBarn?
BD: To capture the story of the birth of personal computing and the origins of the digital lifestyle we are all now living. The artifacts and the story are rapidly being lost and every week someone passes away who had something to contribute to the telling of that story. In a decade or two most of the people who brought us the modern computing world will be gone. In the meantime we are trying to capture oral histories from these people, both the famous and the not-so-famous.
CC: In what ways does the DigiBarn use Creative Commons licensing?
BD: A key goal of the project was to collect and deliver our shared computing heritage to the public for noncommercial use, hence our choice of the Creative Commons framework. In fact, we were very early adopters, supporting the beta testing phase of CC back in 2002, and the DigiBarn site was featured content at the CC launch.
We provide noncommercial share-alike (with attribution) use of hundreds of thousands of photos, written stories, tech specs, scanned documents, audio interviews and video shorts about the history of computing from the late 1940s to today. From artists using our vintage computer photos to produce cool video mixes to academics writing papers and books, thousands of CC-licensed DigiBarn digital objects have found their way into the culture.
CC: How has the DigiBarn grown over the years?
BD: The DigiBarn is well on its way to having a complete collection of every model of significant personal computer (along with all associated materials) from 1975 to the late 80s. We stop collecting artifacts after about 1990, as by that date innovation and diversity in hardware and software was slowing and most computers were pretty much commodity items produced by a few manufacturers. We have also focused on early workstations including the Xerox Alto and Star, which were the first networked machines with graphical interfaces and mice. The only large systems we have are two Cray supercomputers (a Cray 1 and Cray Q2 prototype). These are impressive machines and true things of beauty. Since the web site launched in 1998, the cyber-collection has swelled to over a half million objects.
CC: You also curate a collection of key technical documentation. Can you talk a bit about your experience with this?
BD: Some of our key technical documentation, including video and audio interviews with key innovators, has begun to upset the apple cart in the patent domain. Our November 2004 30th birthday event for “Maze War,” the first-ever first-person shooter, uncovered so much prior art that Sony contacted us about several patent challenges on multi-player gaming. It turns out that by recovering the history of “Maze War,” we had knocked the wind out of several patent claims, which are now headed to settlement instead of to court. In a sense, each bit of digital archeology we dig up and publish openly under CC could roll back the invention envelope, protecting basic innovations in common use from being restricted through inappropriate granting of new patents.
There is another case regarding several loads of original documentation that contained some of Apple Computer’s key early business plans, prototypes and technical design documents. Some of this material had recently been ordered discarded by Apple management, yet these documents were key to understanding the history of Apple and where early innovations came from. It could also have been argued that these records Apple was abandoning were in fact part of a common cultural heritage. The DigiBarn accepted the donations with the full understanding by the donors that they would be made available to the world under CC license and there was no objection. You can see several of these contributions including the Woz Wonderbook and the Preliminary Macintosh Business Plan – 12 July 1981 on our site. More of these fascinating documents will be posted soon.
CC: How can people help the DigiBarn project?
BD: The DigiBarn is an all-volunteer effort with significant personal outlays of funds and time. We are hoping to find financial support to cover at least some of our volunteers’ time and for basic infrastructural improvements to the barn building (we have a big winter moisture problem to solve on the lower floor). We are therefore seeking donors of both funds and other forms of support to keep this effort going. We may establish a foundation for urgent oral history capture if such support can be found. If anyone out there is interested in helping out, please contact us.
We would like to thank Professor Lessig and the Creative Commons team for giving us a legal framework that has made the DigiBarn project possible. We are always encouraging other museums and collectors to adopt CC licensing as we feel it is an important vehicle that makes it possible to place historical digital archives into a container of commonly shared cultural heritage.
No Comments »CC Talks With: Rice University’s Connexions
On first glance — brown hair, pale skin, and undergrad-style clothes — Rich Baraniuk looks like an average guy. But look at his eyes, and you know you’re in the presence of something rare. They’re giant and brown and fairly glowing with the light of the millions of synapses firing at the same instant. They’re the eyes of a man who can’t sit still, of a guy bursting with animation, drive, pep, zest, zing, zip. All of which are necessary given the task Baraniuk took on three years ago, when he decided to write a book and ended up trying to change the way people — everywhere on the planet — think.
Like a lot of guys out to change the world, Baraniuk started out with a modest agenda. An electrical and computer engineering professor at Rice University in Houston, he’d been teaching for about six years when he finally decided that the textbooks he was using weren’t doing their job. They weren’t helping his students learn as much as they should, and they didn’t support his teaching style. He decided he’d write a new, better textbook. So he went to the dean of the school of engineering and proposed the idea. The dean laughed. “Rich came in and said he needed to write a new, better book to teach his course,” says Dean C. Sidney Burrus. “I said, ‘That’s ridiculous. There’re already about 100 books on this subject. You’re going to write the 101st? Think of something new.’ And he did.”
That something new is called Connexions. As described in one of the many documents Baraniuk and the team he leads have used to raise funding, it’s “an experimental, open-source/open content project . . . that gives a learner . . . free access to educational materials that can be readily manipulated to suite her individual learning style. . . . The free software tools also foster the development, manipulation, and continuous refinement of educational material by diverse communities of authors and teachers.”
What does that mean, exactly? When it’s up and running, Connexions will offer an online library of networked content that will allow instructors to pick and choose best-of-breed instructional materials. Experts around the world will develop and contribute modules of information specific to their own expertise. These modules — which may take the form of individual chapters, or even smaller sections of chapters — will act as a giant, constantly evolving library of information that can be tweaked to any given instructor’s satisfaction.
By selecting specific modules and then using Connexion’s free, XML-based editing tools to modify the emphasis of a given course, instructors will be able to create custom textbooks. Students could then go to Kinko’s and order a custom text incorporating the latest research, the best pedagogy — tailored to match their professor’s teaching style and the specific goals of the course at hand. Theoretically, the library will function across disciplines, and will aid teachers and students from kindergarten through graduate school. So far, more than 1000 modules now form the basis for nine electrical and computer engineering courses at Rice.
If that sounds ambitious, think about this: Connexions isn’t just about creating a collection of bite-sized informational chunks. It’s also about fostering a quantum leap in the evolution of literacy — something akin to the development of the first written language or the creation of the printing press. “My perspective about this,” says Burrus, “is not that it’s a just a product of one teacher’s frustrations. I think what we’re doing truly has the potential to change the way people think.”
The people at Connexions believe they’ve found a way to do that. Even more miraculously, a number of people — from the folks at the Hewlett Foundation to the administration at Rice to the U.S. Government — think they may be on to something.
Baraniuk’s big idea grew out of his own sense of frustration about the fragmentary way students learn and teachers teach. He was a great teacher — kids loved his classes — but he could see that they were missing a lot of fundamentals. The problem? The way knowledge was split up into discrete units that seemed so far removed from their lives and interests. “The way we teach breaks everything up and makes it discontinuous, ” says Baraniuk. “Kids would come in and say, ‘Why do I have to learn all this math? I’m interested in genetics.’ And after I sat down with them for half and hour and drew it out on a white board them and showed them how math relates to the field they really wanted to know about, how it was absolutely fundamental, they got it, and generally they’d do much better and learn much more.
“Which was great. I love that part of teaching. But my problem was, ‘Well, okay, how do I apply that understanding to a whole classroom full of students? I can’t sit down and explain the connections to each and every person in my lectures. I don’t have that kind of time. And I finally thought, ‘Wow, there’s just gotta be a better way.’”
Baraniuk’s main beef with traditional teaching and textbooks is that they’re too linear. Subjects are broken up into discrete units, and then never reconnected. Textbooks mirror this flaw in that they are completely linear, and depending on the particular focus of a course, tend to offer a great deal of irrelevant or redundant information, while failing to cast any illumination on vital subjects. Even worse, by the time they make it through writing, editing, school board reviews, publishing and finally into students hands, textbooks — especially in the fast moving sciences — are often obsolete.
By shaping raw knowledge into discrete chunks rather than 2000-page textbooks, Connexions aims to scratch a real-world itch that’s long been unreachable. Instructors will be able to do away with huge chunks of text that don’t apply to their courses, while culling the Connexions database for pieces that apply to their specific areas of instructors. To make that task manageable, Connexions will offer a series of “lenses” that allow users to limit the pool from which they’re choosing. In other words, if Baraniuk wanted to limit his search to courses that the dean liked, he could do so. Or he might choose to view modules that other users had ranked as effective, modules that students liked, modules that resulted in better test scores, modules approved by professional societies, modules produced by certain universities, or even for-fee modules created by Prentice-Hall.
In the last three years, the Connexions team has faced — and cleared — a lot of hurdles. The last of these turned on a legal issue: specifically, the development of licenses that would both protect authors’ intellectual property rights and allow the sort of open usage and modification that Connexions facilitates. “We felt totally hamstrung by our own legal department,” says Baraniuk. “I mean, it’s hard to come into the administration and say, look at all this great stuff we want to give away — the source code, the ability to publish and modify this content, the content itself.”
The problems occurred when the legal team at Rice, accustomed to protecting the university’s intellectual property, suddenly found itself face to face with a bunch of technologists who wanted to take a page from the open-source movement and adhere to an ethic of maximum openness.
“When we started trying to work through the issues, it wasn’t about the attorneys helping us iron out a few legal details,” says Ross Reedstrom, a research scientist at Rice and a Connexions programmer. “I spent hours and hours trying to educate our legal team about the concept of openness.”
The problem was that, to the legal team, “free” and “open” meant “unprotected.” And unprotected was not something the Rice legal team was willing to countenance. The clash was perhaps, inevitable. “It’s interesting that education is the place where the problem of licensing open, free materials became an issue,” says Chris Kelty, an anthropologist who studies the open source movement and is on staff at Connexions. “Educators traditionally build on the shoulders of their peers. This project is all about trying to systematize, formalize and facilitate something that already happens.”
After weeks of barely productive meetings that left the entire Connexions staff frustrated with the Rice legal team, Chris suggested that Connexions meet with his colleague, James Boyle, a law professor at Duke and Creative Commons boardmember. The meeting of needs and minds was instantaneous. “Creative Commons came along at the exact right time. We had this huge problem, how to license content in a way that left it open and dynamic, but still offered protections,” says Baraniuk. Sitting down together, Boyle, Reedstrom, and the Rice legal team were quickly able to hash through most of the remaining licensing issues. Creative Commons will provide the licenses that protect Connexions authors and the Connexions repository.
The licensing issues have the response from the academic community has been positive. “It’s been very easy to get professors to agree to write course modules,” says Baraniuk. “People really understand that with these licenses they aren’t giving up credit, and they are opening their ideas up to what is potentially a huge audience.”
The next hurdle? Filling the Connexions repository with strong content. “The big question now is the take off. When does the project leave the ground?,” says Kelty. “If we only get a bunch of mediocre DSP [Digital Signal Processing] texts, well, it won’t be that useful.”
But signs are that momentum is growing. Professors at other universities are beginning to take notice, and Dean Burrus recently chaired a National Academy of Engineering workshop about how to build an online educational initiative that transcends ownership by any one university and becomes a truly global entity. Attendees included representatives from the Department of Education, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of California at Berkeley, Michigan State, Columbia, and Carnegie Mellon. Finally, the Hewlett Foundation recently awarded the project a $1,000,000 grant to establish a sustainable business model.
“I think we really have a great chance at getting where we want to go,” says Baraniuk. “What distinguishes us from other initiatives is simple: we have Rice’s buy-in to the idea that at some point, we may spin this off into a creative nonprofit. That’s huge. That means we really could be global.”
Ashley Craddock is a freelance writer living in Austin, Texas. Her work has appeared in Wired, Mother Jones, Working Woman and Marie Claire, among other places.
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