Rice

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

Rice University’s revolutionary, open-source publishing platform
Connexions today received a third-phase $1.7 million grant from the
William and Flora Hewlett Foundation that will allow Connexions to
become more self-sustaining through new revenue generating initiatives.

“The Hewlett Foundation has generously supported Connexions from its
infancy, and we’re proud of their commitment to support us while we
grow and learn to make our way in the world,” said Connexions founder
Richard Baraniuk, the Victor C. Cameron Professor of Electrical and
Computer Engineering at Rice.

Founded in 1999, the nonprofit Connexions is one of the Web’s first
open educational resources. Connexions adapts open-source concepts to
educational publishing, allowing anyone anywhere in the world to read,
write, use and modify materials for free. The number of people using
Connexions has grown by almost 70 percent during the past year, and the
site today is attracting around 500,000 visitors each month.

“We’re entering the most ambitious phase of our development,” Baraniuk
said. “We’re looking at three potential revenue streams that may allow
us to become self-supporting, and we’re committed to developing those
without betraying our core mission to keep all of our material
available for free.”

Connexions’ initial revenue streams will come from the sale of books.
In one case, Connexions plans to found a University Press Consortium
that allows member presses to offer print-on-demand publication of
money-losing monographs that are academically important but which
simply cost too much to publish. The model builds upon Rice’s
announcement in July that it would use Connexions to revive its own
university press, which was shuttered in 1996. The reopened Rice
University Press published its first title, “Art History and Its
Publications in the Electronic Age,” early this month (see
http://cnx.org/content/col10376/1.1).

In the University Press Consortium, members will be able to clear
backlogged titles and deliver high-quality books to readers, thanks to
Connexions’ agreement with print-on-demand vendor QOOP Inc. Also
announced in July, the print deal is already allowing Connexions offer
a handful of titles, including a $30 hardbound, 300-page engineering
text that would typically cost about $150 from a traditional press.

Under this model, readers can access all books online for free, and
they will pay only if they want a printed book, which they’ll order
online and for home delivery. Connexions and the press that owns the
title will make only a few cents per book, but with minimal overhead
and production costs, they can still expect to break even or make a
small profit.

Connexions also plans to develop a catalog of the 10 most-popular
community college textbooks, which also will be free for online viewing
and cost less than $30 when purchased as hardbound books.

“According to the latest federal data, the cost of college textbooks
has nearly tripled over the past 20 years, outpacing inflation by about
2-to-1,” Baraniuk said. “The average community college student today
spends almost as much on books as on tuition. Our goal is to
dramatically affect the economics of textbooks by providing
high-utility courses in Connexions that can be customized by
instructors and printed affordably by students.”

Connexions’ final revenue-generating plan involves licensing its
platform to companies for in-house corporate training. This model will
allow companies to slash costs for updating printed materials,
particularly for large product lines, and Connexions’ robust
translation features will allow companies to easily convert courses and
texts into other languages, including Spanish, Chinese, Thai, Japanese
and Italian.

The latest round of Hewlett Foundation funding follows two earlier
grants totaling $2.25 million that helped fund the development of
Connexions’ user software and backend platform.

Connexions is part of a broader effort by the Hewlett Foundation to
bring educational materials to the Internet in innovative ways. In the
past four years, the foundation has disbursed more than $60 million in
grants to support programs worldwide that advance the promise of open
educational resources—or OER, as it is known to educators.

To explore Connexions’ courses and learn how to post lessons, create courses and teach students, visit http://cnx.org.