1. The Founder’s Story C. Sidney Burrus (and Richard Baraniuk)
The Connexions Project, Rice University
2009
Connexions

2. How Connexions Happened
Professor Richard “Rich” Baraniuk became frustrated by the disconnected topics he was teaching in a junior EE course. In the mid 1990s he developed a new organization for the course that showed the connections among the topics and decided to write a book on it.
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3. Write another Book??
His dean (me), his department chair (Don Johnson), his ex thesis advisor at Illinois (Doug Jones), and others said “don’t do that”. You will simply add one more book to the 100 that already exist. I told him to do something different. So, he did. In October 1999, he created Connexions!
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4. Foundation of Connexions
Rich and one of his graduate students, Brendt Hendricks, took ideas from the Open Source software movement and the music community, and decided to create a modular structure using XML and put the content in an open repository on the web under a Creative Commons copyright. That was the birth of Connexions.
Connexions

5. Born in 1999
Three EE faculty members joined with Rich to start creating content. Brendt and several others started creating the system tools and the basic Connexions system was set in November and December of 1999.
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6. Year 2000
The president of Rice, the provost, the chief librarian, the dean of engineering, several board members, and some Rice alumni provided seed funding. The content for two EE courses were entered and turned into printed books.
There were 200 modules in the repository.
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7. 2001
Chris Kelty (anthropologist) and Rich work with the Creative Commons and helped them define open copyrights.
An authoring interface was created
500 modules were in the repository
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8. 2002
A laboratory course at the University of Illinois creates a Connexions book.
The first Hewlett Foundation funding.
Geneva Henry becomes the first Executive Director
Kitty Jones and Tony Brandt started music content
Cnx was one of the first members of Creative Commons
900 modules in the repository
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9. 2003, 2004 2003 Norwegians become first internationals
2003, 2004
2003 Norwegians become first internationals
Edit-in-Place introduced making authoring easier
1600 modules in the repository
2004 Second Hewlett Foundation funding
National Instruments first corp. authors
MS Word imported introduced
2300 modules in the repository
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10. 2005 2005 Rhaptos 1.5 software released
MS Word importer introduced and Edit-in-Place improved
Connexions became a dot-org (cnx.org)
Joey King joins as the Executive Director
Cnx adopts Creative Commons 2.0
Translations into Chinese, Italian, Japanese, Spanish, Thai, etc.
2800 modules in the repository
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11. 2006-present Third Hewlett Foundation funding
Joel Thierstein becomes Executive Director
Lenses introduced to allow endorsement, reviewing, and quality assurance.
4500 modules in repository in 2007
Vietnam adopts Cnx as national platform
LaTeX importer introduced
Books printed and for sale by QOOP
Shuttleworth Foundation project started in SA
8000 modules in the repository in Jan. 2009
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12. Open Educational Resources
The term "open educational resources" was first adopted at UNESCO's 2002 Forum on the Impact of Open Courseware for Higher Education in Developing Countries. Open educational resources are educational materials and resources offered freely and openly for anyone to use and under some licenses to re-mix, improve and redistribute.
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13. Open Educational Resources
Open educational resources include:
Learning content: full courses, course materials, content modules, learning objects, collections, and journals.
Tools: Software to support the creation, delivery, use and improvement of open learning content including searching and organization of content, content and learning management systems, content development tools, and on-line learning communities.
Implementation resources: Intellectual property licenses to promote open publishing of materials, design-principles, and localization of content.
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14. Open Educational Resources
The Open Educational Resource (OER) 2002
movement was inspired by the Open Source movement (1998) in software development.
Connexions “Cnx” (Rice)
Wikipedia (Wikibooks, etc.)
Creative Commons (CC)
Open Course Ware “OCW” (MIT)
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