Connexions wins $2M from Hewlett Foundation

Connexions wins $2M from Hewlett Foundation
Grant will fund user-friendly software, creation of user consortium

BY JADE BOYD
Rice News staff

The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation has awarded $2 million to Rice’s open-education program, Connexions. The two-year grant — the fifth from the foundation to Connexions since 2002 — will allow Connexions to develop a new generation of easy-to-use authoring software and to establish a user consortium to fund the program’s future growth.

Founded in 1999 as one of the first Open Educational Resources (OER) on the World Wide Web, Connexions has long pioneered digital education. Connexions is a platform and repository for OER that lets people create, share, modify and vet open educational materials that are accessible to anyone, anywhere, anytime for free via the Web.

“Thanks to the continued support of the Hewlett Foundation, Connexions has become one of the most powerful and dynamic content management systems in use today sitting on top of one of the largest repositories of OER content,” said Connexions’ Executive Director Joel Thierstein, associate provost for innovative scholarly communication at Rice.

Connexions’ modular interactive information is in use by universities, community colleges, primary and secondary schools and lifelong learners worldwide. The number of people using Connexions has grown by 35 percent over the past year to approximately 750,000 visitors per month, making it one of the world’s most popular OER sites.

“We’ll be making a major push to significantly increase the amount of content in Connexions over the next two years,” Thierstein said. “Connexions’ programmers will be focusing on improvements specifically designed to make it easier and more rewarding to create content in Connexions.”

In addition to English, Connexions has content in Chinese, Spanish, Japanese, Vietnamese, Italian, French, Portuguese and Thai, among others. Connexions’ distribution system also allows for print-on-demand and accelerates the delivery of educational materials into classrooms.

Over the next two years, Connexions will work on sustainability. As part of its long-range business plan, Connexions will develop the Connexions Consortium to spread the rights and responsibilities for Connexions among committed stakeholders. Some of Connexions’ large early adopters will likely be among the founding members of the Connexions Consortium.

The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation helped establish the open-education movement and has provided more than $75 million over the past five years — including more than $6 million to Connexions — to help develop systems for making high-quality educational material universally and freely available to users.

To learn more about Connexions, visit http://cnx.org or contact Thierstein at joel@cnx.org or 713-348-3674.