Open Textbooks Advocate Circles Back To Tech - Education - Online

abernard102@gmail.com 2013-08-23

Summary:

"Until recently, the thing Rice University's Richard G. Baraniuk has become best known for, promoting the spread of open educational resources, has had little to do with his day job, working on math-intensive challenges in electrical and computer engineering. As a young professor frustrated that there was no good textbook for his course, Baraniuk decided that rather than create a textbook under a traditional publishing model, it would make more sense to create an open-source, web-based product that could benefit from community contributions and more easily be updated to keep pace with the rate of technological change. Taking his inspiration from successful open-source software products like Linux, he also thought that educational content should be organized into discrete modules that could be mixed and remixed, just as core modules and a variety of add-ons make up the different distributions of Linux.  The result of these musings was Connexions, a repository of course modules made freely available for educational use created in 1999. The most recent variation is OpenStax College, a series of complete, open licensed college textbooks that an instructor can use as is or modify and remix using the tools in Connexions. The first OpenStax books appeared in 2012, and Rice estimates they've saved students $3.7 million in the past year.  Baraniuk oversees both projects, and his passion for promoting open educational resources (OERs) earned him a 2006 TED Talk speaking slot. More recently, he published a treatise on the value of open education in the National Academy of Engineering journal, The Bridge. He was a participant in and organizer of an OER panel discussion I moderated recently at the Distance Teaching & Learning Conference at the University of Wisconsin.  Until the advent of OpenStax Tutor, a learning analytics software project and cloud service, Baraniuk's specific technical talents had little overlap with his OER work.  Connexions is less like an advanced technology venture than a Web publishing operation, although it does run on a custom-content management system, Rhaptos. Available as open-source software, Rhaptos organizes XML or HTML5 chunks of content in a way that supports easy remixing and output to a variety of formats, including PDFs and e-books. 'None of this has anything to do with my day job,' Baraniuk said ..."

Link:

http://www.informationweek.com/education/online-learning/math-prof-becomes-open-textbooks-advocat/240160294

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » abernard102@gmail.com

Tags:

oa.new oa.comment oa.universities oa.oer oa.students oa.connexions oa.textbooks oa.prices oa.courseware oa.education oa.openstax oa.colleges oa.books oa.hei

Date tagged:

08/23/2013, 19:33

Date published:

08/23/2013, 15:32