The Connexions Project: Promoting Open Sharing of Knowledge for Education

The Connexions project at Rice University has created an open repository of educational materials and tools to promote sharing and exploration of knowledge as a dynamic continuum of interrelated concepts. Available free of charge to anyone under open-content and open-source licenses, Connexions offers high-quality, custom-tailored electronic course material, is adaptable to a wide range of learning styles, and encourages students to explore the links among concepts, courses, and disciplines. Connexions fosters worldwide, cross-institution communities of authors, instructors, and students, who collaborate on the creation of knowledge building blocks from which courses are constructed. The ideas and philosophy embodied by Connexions have the potential to change the very nature of teaching and learning, producing a dynamic, interconnected educational environment that is pedagogically sound, both time and cost efficient, and engaging. Faculty and Student Perceptions of Education “Why don’t they see the bigger picture?” vs. “Why am I studying this!” The frustration experienced by instructors and students alike throughout the teaching and learning process has been a key motivation for developing Connexions. After teaching one of his undergraduate Engineering courses in Digital Signal Processing (DSP), Dr. Richard Baraniuk had the feeling that his students just weren’t “getting it.” Their knowledge reflected in the exams showed they had absorbed what he had taught, but he doubted they understood how the pieces were related. So he took a handful of his most successful students from the course and asked them to tell him what they had learned. They were quick to recite the topics they had learned in the order he had taught them (“first we learned a, then we learned b,” etc.) It was a linear progression through the course rather than a deeper understanding of how the topics they studied were interrelated. Rich realized that it was important to somehow present the information in a way that would show how the concepts in his course were connected to each other, as well as to concepts they studied in prerequisite courses and courses that would follow. In this way, students could easily refresh their memories with information they learned earlier and look to other courses to see how what they were learning now would be relevant to more advanced topics. A significant contributor to the linear learning process students experience is the course textbook. Textbooks provide students with more in-depth explanations of concepts than an instructor can during a lecture, given the time constraints of courses. As a reference source, textbooks provide a persistent store of explanations that students can review to