Utah State University partners with Rice’s Connexions Project

CONTACT: Jade Boyd
PHONE: (713) 348-6778
E-MAIL: jadeboyd@rice.edu

Utah State University partners with Rice’s Connexions Project
USU’s OSLO Group To Provide Free Human Support for Connexions Users

Rice University’s Connexions Project has partnered with Utah State University’s Open Sustainable Learning Opportunity (OSLO) Group to enable world-wide discussion and support of Connexions’ open-access course materials. Connexions adapts the open-source software concept to scholarly academic content, making it easy for scholars and teachers worldwide to publish course curricula in a single online repository, where anyone can use it or modify it to meet their own specific needs.

Open Learning Support (OLS) is social software that allows individuals to connect with each other, form study groups, and receive support for using Connexions materials in formal and informal educational settings.

”It’s an honor to work with the Connexions project,” said OSLO Group Director David Wiley, ”The Connexions team have executed on a great vision of the benefits open access to educational materials can provide. We’re extremely proud to be providing what we hope will be a very valuable service for their users.”

OLS also currently serves MIT’s OpenCourseWare initiative and the joint MIT/Microsoft iCampus project, and OLS leaders plan to integrate with additional educational materials from other collections.

”Partnering with OSLO enables us to realize our vision of building global communities around Connexions because OLS will allow anyone in the world to get involved in discussions about Connexions’ scholarly content,” said Connexions Director Richard Baraniuk, professor of electrical and computer engineering at Rice.

Both OLS and Connexions are funded by grants from The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.