OCW Webinar Introducing Connexions and Enterprise Rhaptos

Joel Thierstein, Associate Provost of Rice University and Connexions' Executive Director is giving a webinar on Connexions and Enterprise Rhaptos on Thursday, April 1st at 10 AM EST.

Joel will introduce Connexions and Enterprise Rhaptos to the Open Courseware community. Rhaptos is the open source software that lets you install Connexions as a platform for your open content website. He will discuss the wny's and hows of using Connexions or Rhaptos to meet your goals and achieve your priorities. You can read more about Enterprise Rhaptos here.

The OCW Consortium is hosting the webinar and it is free with no required registration. To fully participate in the webinar you will need a headset or webcam, but you can also participate through text-base chat. To join, click here. To find out more about OCW Consortium and the webinar they are hosting, see their blog about it.

Rice University Press in the Chronicle

The Houston Chronicle recently highlighted Rice University Press for its digital publishing of scholarly works, all of which are openly available on Connexions. While other university presses are exploring digital options, the article says that "Rice goes further: Every book may be read online for free; none are printed until an order is placed, with the payment covering the cost of printing and delivering the book. There is no sales staff, nor warehouses to hold unsold books." The fully digital options allow the press to support unique projects that don't fit into traditional marketing categories. You can read about the press's latest projects in the full article here, and you can see all the Rice University books available through Connexions by visiting the Rice University Press lens on Connexions.

One way to get high-quality content into Connexions

Principal Investigator, Prof. C. Sidney Burrus, spearheaded a major effort to publish high-quality education materials in Connexions. His National Science Foundation Innovation Partnership grant supported a collaboration between Rice University and National Instruments to extend the frontiers of higher education, especially in the area of digital signal processing. The grant funded the publication of 22 textbooks and courses by preeminent scholars, highlighted in the NSF Partnership in Signal Processing Lens.

The content came from distinguished faculty across the US that were eager to share their experience in research and teaching. The grant funded training and publicity and content support for editing and formatting them for Connexions. To date, these materials have been used by over 7 million people, averaging 50,000 views per week.

Faculty-friendly Connexions documentation

Connexions author, Ken Busbee, has become one of the most vocal supporters of open education materials and Connexions, in particular, as a repository of choice for sharing and reusing those materials. Ken is faculty at Houston Community College, a founding member of the Connexions Consortium.

In his effort to help new authors understand and take advantage of Connexions, Ken has been creating faculty-friendly documentation for Connexions. The training materials themselves live in Connexions and he puts them all together inside a Connexions lens, called Busbee's Connexions Training Lens.

Here is how Ken describes the new training materials that he has created:

"These materials are designed to orient and familiarize readers with the features of Connexions Project. They have been organized into 6 collections that contain over 25 modules that cover:

1. Understanding the Vision of Connexions
2. How to Search and Browse the Connexions Web Site (includes rating modules)
3. Effectively Using and Creating Connexions Lenses
4. Authoring Connexions Modules using Microsoft Word Documents
5. Ideas and Tools for Improving Connexions Modules and Collections
6. Appendix Materials for a Connexions Collection used as a College Course

Here is a link to the materials: http://cnx.org/lenses/kbusbee/cnx-training"