Forging New Connexions

By Jade Boyd and Christopher Dow

The digital age probably has produced more fads in its short life than any other human endeavor in a comparable time span. Remember the dot-com boom—and bust? Remember floppy disks, Zip drives, and mini-CDs? And with music downloads now easily available from the Internet, CDs most likely are already on the way out, too. But sometimes a new digital way of doing things escapes the trash heap of obsolescence and actually becomes practical. News distribution, for example, has found active life on the Internet, where stories often break a full day ahead of printed newspaper coverage. Rice’s open-source-based Connexions project is banking that the growing trend toward open-source software and projects will be the next digital success story.

The idea behind open source, which began with just a few software pioneers like Linux and Apache, is simple and, to a degree, even noble. Open-source software developers essentially relinquish proprietary interest in their code, allowing other software developers the freedom to read, use, redistribute, adapt, and modify it. The premise is that software will become more robust and useful due to the involvement of other interested programmers. But the open-source concept isn’t limited to software code. Information is equally fair game. “Now everyone is jumping on the open-source bandwagon, especially in the area of education,” says Paul Dholakia, associate professor of management at Rice’s Jesse H. Jones Graduate School of Management. Over the past three years, the number of open-source projects has exploded, encompassing 75,000-plus software sites and hundreds of university offerings, including Connexions.

But if users don’t have to pay, what makes open-source endeavors economically sustainable? According to Dholakia’s research, open source offers more revenue-generating opportunities than organizers can reasonably pursue. With new open-source projects launching daily, Dholakia views sustainability as the key to a project’s success. “Just like with the dot-com explosion, some of the projects will overlap and merge,” he says. “Others will be poorly managed and go bust.”

From an idealistic standpoint, Dholakia believes open source has great potential, and he would like to see it established as a permanent resource that continues to grow. But realistically, he wonders how many open-source developers will properly apply the lessons of business to their projects. “To sustain themselves,” he says, “open-source projects must focus on making their offerings work from a business perspective.”

Dholakia points out one mistake common with open-source projects: trying to determine how to make money in the early stages. Too much attention is paid to the site’s features and technology and not enough to understanding the users and potential users and what constitutes value to those people. If the initial focus is on revenue, Dholakia believes, sustainability is being considered the wrong way. “Unless the site is able to first gain and maintain a critical mass of active, engaged users and provide substantial and unique value to them in the start-up and growth phases,” he explains, “it’s unlikely any revenue model will work in the long run.”

Using his experiences with Connexions, Dholakia is discovering more answers to the sustainability question. Connexions adapts the open-source software concept to scholarly academic content, allowing anyone to freely publish course materials in a single place online. Connexions is organized around a “content commons,” an online repository that contains thousands of scholarly modules—manuscripts roughly equivalent to two or three pages of a textbook. Connexions provides free software that allows anyone to reuse, revise, and recombine the modules to suit their needs. This feature gives people the option of creating customized courses, custom textbooks, and personalized study guides.

In a sense, Connexions is an ongoing, large-scale experiment that will help demonstrate what is needed to effectively create and sustain the conditions for the use of educational and scholarly materials by educators and learners worldwide. Connexions relies on a value-based segmentation model to help define some of its revenue-generating opportunities—a model, Dholakia believes, that can be applied to other open-source projects. “While providing open access to all the educational content on site to users,” he says, “we can simultaneously provide value-added services to specific user segments and charge them for those services.” Such services might be training and user support for institutional users, housing and dissemination of copyrighted content within the same site on a subscription basis, ask-an-expert services, or consulting services to provide custom education to corporate clients.

Connexions has experienced rapid growth over the past year, both in terms of site visitors and in terms of authorship. This year, the site has attracted more than 500,000 unique visitors each month. “From its inception, Connexions has used the Web to go beyond print,” says Richard Baraniuk, the Victor C. Cameron Professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering and founder of Connexions. “It lets pupils and instructors make cross-disciplinary intellectual leaps with a simple mouse click, following knowledge wherever learning takes them.”

But being web-based also is about access. “Our materials are freely available to everyone,” Baraniuk says, “but we need an easy, low-cost way to let people use a book if that’s the medium they are most comfortable learning from.” And cost is driving other factors. A new 300-page, hardbound engineering textbook from a traditional publisher, for example, often sells for $100 to $150. “Today, because of the costs, more and more students are fleeing the market in favor of used or borrowed books,” Baraniuk says. “Publishers have responded to this trend by raising prices, which has only created a downward spiral.” He notes that, for students, the downside to the increased use of used books is that some technical fields are advancing so rapidly that used books often are seriously out of date, and students leave the class unprepared for what awaits them in the job market.

In an effort to combine the best of web-based learning and the preference of some students for printed texts, Connexions has forged a print-on-demand agreement with California-based QOOP Inc. that will allow students and instructors anywhere in the world to order high-quality, hardbound textbooks from Connexions at greatly reduced prices. “Our combination of open content and print-on-demand technology will change the paradigm, both economically and academically,” Baraniuk says. “We’re going to give students access to the latest, up-to-date material, and we’re going to do it at used-book prices.” The price of a hardbound Connexions textbook—only $15 to $20—includes not only costs and profit for the on-demand press but also a small sustainability revenue stream that funds the Connexions project, as well as a revenue stream that will enable students in developing countries to get the print-on-demand version of the book for free. Standard paperbacks will take just three to five days to produce and ship, while hardbacks will take about a week. QOOP ships directly to customers.

The deal with QOOP positions Connexions to take the lead in open-source textbook publishing, and Connexions plans to offer more than 100 titles for online purchase by year’s end. No other publisher of open-source educational content can match those offerings. This is partly due to Connexions’ early adoption of licenses developed by the nonprofit organization Creative Commons (creativecommons.org). These licenses provide a flexible range of protections for authors and freedoms for users. Because all content on the site is authored under these licenses, there are no copyright conflicts to negotiate.

QOOP’s on-demand service will allow Connexions users to order customized course guides and a variety of fully developed Connexions textbooks. Moreover, each student will be able to use Connexions to build their own customized textbook. “Let’s say a student is in an engineering course, and they’re a little weak in math, so they want to weave in more fundamental calculus. Connexions allows them to create their own customized version of the course,” Baraniuk explains. “They can do that right now for free on the Web, and if they want that version in book form, then the QOOP deal will allow them to have it delivered to their home within a matter of days.”

The collaboration with Connexions is an excellent example of how new technology solutions can dramatically impact a marketplace, says QOOP president Phil Wessells. “Textbooks and course guides have grown so prohibitively expensive that systemic change is needed,” he says. “By combining our on-demand production network with Connexions’ course-creation software platform, we hope to make textbooks much more affordable for the students.”

And those students might be anywhere in the world. In July, for example, Connexions announced an agreement with the Vietnam Education Foundation (VEF), Vietnam’s Ministry of Education and Training (MOET), and Vietnam Advanced Software Company (VASC) to deploy the Connexions open-source document creation and management system and content to improve education and research throughout Vietnam. The effort began with a series of training sessions in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City.

“Connexions will provide the tools that Vietnam needs to turn passive, open-source study materials into active learning resources for both teachers and students,” says Kien Pham, executive director of VEF, an independent U.S. federal agency created by Congress to strengthen relations between Vietnam and the United States through educational exchanges in science and technology. Baraniuk concurs. “Our extensible, web-based technology, open-source licensing, and unique content are a valuable combination for Vietnamese educators, both economically and academically,” he says. “Connexions will benefit Vietnam’s students and instructors by allowing them to both create and access materials that are free, constantly updated, and presented in a unique manner that engages students in ways that printed books cannot.”

Under the agreement, MOET will coordinate and promote the use of Connexions at universities and institutions of higher learning throughout Vietnam. VASC, one of Vietnam’s leading software, Internet, and media companies and owner of the open-source education portal Vietnam Open Courseware (VOCW), will act as technical collaborator and incorporate the use of Connexions’ tools on the VOCW portal. Connexions will provide regular software updates and technical advice and support to MOET and VASC, including training assistance. VEF will act as catalyst and facilitator, working closely with each of the partners to coordinate and promote the use of Connexions in Vietnam.

“Our technology makes it easy to both create content in Vietnamese and translate existing Connexions content into Vietnamese,” Baraniuk says. And Vietnamese is just the latest addition to the Connexions linguistic portfolio. “This ease of translation,” Baraniuk says, “is one reason instructors around the globe already are using our content in Spanish, Chinese, Thai, Japanese, Italian, and other languages.”

In its relatively young life, the Internet has promised many boons, and though some have gone bust, perhaps the greatest—expansion of knowledge into every corner of the world—is steadily making inroads thanks to projects like Connexions. Dholakia puts it succinctly when he says, “Delivering quality educational material to those who otherwise would be unable to afford it is just one way open-source projects can do good in the world.”

Connexions is funded primarily by Rice University and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, which has contributed $2.25 million to the program.

Visit Connexions at www.cnx.org.