How to control for quality in Connexions?

There's a recent news story up at Connexions reviewing an article by Norm Friesen over at learningspaces.org. In the article, he independently ranks a bunch of open educational resources with "value to schools, universities and to other organizations with educational mandates". Sounds just like what we do, right? So we weren't too surprised to hear that Connexions tied in first place, with a score of 14 out of a possible 15.

What grabbed my attention was his ranking criteria: Norm found very few repositories that had both a) a non-restrictive license that lets users re-use and re-mix content easily, and b) some sort of quality assurance, through peer reviews or other methods. These are the qualities he says make open educational resources most useful for educational institutions, and luckily, Connexions is one of the few repositories to have.

Here at Connexions, all content is published under a CC-by license, which is as non-restrictive a license as possible while still recognizing and attributing work to the author. That means that it is legally possibly to re-use content. Of course, we go one step further in publishing all content with a standardized format to make "frictionless remix"* even easier (it's hard to remix a .pdf with a Powerpoint presentation, for example).

In the past year we have also rolled out several ways to vet content:

1. Individual users can rate modules on a 5-star scale.


2. When browsing or searching content, you have the option to sort by Popularity, which is based on the number of page hits a module receives. This lets you quickly find content that is viewed often.


3. Most powerfully, users and organizations can create Lenses to highlight useful material. Organizations can create Endorsement lenses (peer-reviewed content, vouched for by the organization) or Affiliate lenses (content associated with the organization in some way, but not necessarily peer-reviewed). All other lenses are Member Lists, which allow you to pull together content that you deem to be of value; content of good quality, content all in the same subject, or simply content that you like. Finally, lenses also allow users to provide their own tags and commentary for all content within the lens.
   

At the conference, I repeatedly heard the wish for more quality content, so that instructors would have more choices to mix and match from. The catch, of course, is that we are committed to being open-source, which means we definitely don't want to prevent any content from being published. That leaves us the option of somehow marking works that are of good quality after they are already published, which is exactly what module ranking, sorting by popularity, and lenses are meant to do.

What other methods of quality control do you think would be useful in Connexions?

* Kudos to Brad Wheeler for the great term, which got tossed around a lot during the Connexions Conference 2010.

Conference presentations and webcasts posted

If you were unable to make it to the Connexions Conference (or, like me, were outside at the registration table all day) there's still a way to share in the whirlwind of exciting ideas, partners, and future developments for Connexions.

We've posted the agenda and presentations of the talks on our site. There's even a link there to the archived videos of the talks. So you can listen to the conference from the convenience of your own chair.

Connexions Conference 2010 Feedback

We on the Connexions staff always learn so much from the Connexions conference. It is fantastic to see the breadth of projects using Connexions and hear the feedback on what we are doing and contemplating. This year, with the release of Enterprise Rhaptos, we are really encouraged that the community using and developing for Connexions and Rhaptos will grow even faster than it has been.

Tom Caswell makes several very interesting comments about Connexions, Rhaptos, and the Connexions conference on the OCW blog, "Good things brewing at 2nd Connexions conference." He was particularly interested in the release of Enterprise Rhaptos, the new web math editor, Google Analytics for authors, and potential support for using Connexions textbooks and collections inside learning management systems that support Common Cartridge. He also encouraged us as a community to create a simple web editor for Connexions.

My response on his blog has pointers to more information on the features he was interested in.

To see all the comments about Connexions Conference 2010 on Twitter, both during the conference, and after, search using "cnx2010", or use this saved query.

Successful Houston OER Workshop

Guest Post by author: Ken Busbee of Houston Community College

On Wednesday, February 3rd, following the Connexions 2010 conference, Jacky Hood, the Director of the Community College Open Textbook Collaboration (CCOTC) and Director of the Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources (CCCOER), gave a workshop titled: How to Adopt an Open Textbook for a Community College Class. The workshop was hosted by Houston Community College and Connexions with Rice University providing meeting space. Attended by 14 individual of which 6 have expressed an interest in returning to their institutions and presenting mini workshops to other faculty members.

The Connexions Project is working in cooperation with the CCOTC to increase the number of quality OpenCourseWare (OCW) textbooks for the core curriculum taught within the first two years of college. The CCOTC is preparing faculty at many institutions across the nation to give mini workshops on adopting Open Educational Resources (OER) with emphasis on faculty adopting OCW textbooks for their courses. Funding is being provided by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.

Connexions Developer Community Gets Its Own Blog

The Connexions developer community now has its own blog. A few of you have given us feedback that this blog can get too geeky. I am not sure we can completely solve that problem, but believe me, we are working on serving the needs of the WHOLE community to the best of our geeky abilities. So to that end, technical news and discussion will be carried out on the newly created Connexions and Rhaptos (the software running Connexions) development blog, (devblog.cnx.org). We will save this blog (blog.cnx.org) for news relevant to the entire community of Connexions readers, authors, and developers, and use the developer blog for technical information and discussions.

The first few entries provide an introduction to the developer blog and a guide to Connexions and Rhaptos documentation. We will continue to make updates as we work with developers and find out how best to organize and make discoverable documentation and development plans. We also encourage our development partners to blog with us. Send email to cnx@cnx.org with ideas for the blog and requests to guest blog.