Connexions

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For the British agency, see Connexions agency
For the middle school in Baltimore, Maryland of the same name see, ConneXions Leadership Academy

Connexions (cnx.org) is a global repository of educational content that can be adapted and updated by new authors. The whole collection is freely available and students and learners can explore all the content.

Connexions is pioneering, along with other projects such as MIT OpenCourseWare and the Public Library of Science, the idea that scholarly and educational content can and should be shared, re-used and recombined, interconnected and continually enriched.

Contents

[edit] Subject matter

Connexions contains educational materials at all levels — from children to college students to professionals — organized in small modules that can be connected into larger courses. Material is authored by people from all walks of life. A large amount of content is created by university professors, but the collection also contains very popular music content created by a part-time music teacher.

Connexions popular material is translated into many languages, aided by the open-content licensing.

[edit] Copyright

To ensure the legal reusability of content, Connexions requires authors to license materials they publish under the Creative Commons Attribution License (presently, version 2.0). Under this license, the author retains the right to be credited (attributed) wherever the content is reused. The author grants others the right to copy, distribute, and display the work, and to derive works based on it, as long as the author is credited.

[edit] How is Connexions different from other open education projects?

  • First, in scale: Connexions has content from all over the world in a growing variety of languages, not just materials from one specific school or university. It also collects materials to support education in K-12, community college, university, continuing education, and industrial training settings.
  • Second, by the way communities are supported: Connexions is globally accessible to anyone to not only read and use the materials, but also take them, customize them, and contribute them back to the repository.
  • Third, in the way it is organized: Connexions is grassroots organized from the bottom up rather than from the top down like many other open education projects. Everyone is free to join and take on a leadership role.

[edit] Technical details

Three key factors enable the collaborative environment in Connexions:

  • copyright licenses that preserve attribution but permit sharing: Creative Commons "attribution" licenses
  • semantic markup of documents using XML (exensible markup language) so they can be searched for and combined. The markup language used is called cnxml.
  • workspaces that facilitate collaboration by providing shared space, the ability to version materials and derive content from existing modules. (See rhaptos.org, Connexions' open-source tools for publishing.)

[edit] Funding

The Connexions project was started in 1999 and initially supported by individuals and Rice University. That support has been substantially supplemented by grants from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.

[edit] See also

  • Creative Commons - the organization that created the licenses used by Connexions

[edit] External links

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