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IEEE Signal
Processing Society offers free educational content via Connexions
Partnership
assures quality of open-access educational materials

BY JADE BOYD
Rice News staff

Rice University’s Connexions
and the IEEE Signal
Processing Society (IEEE-SPS) announced the release
this week of a broad collection of free, high-quality lessons that practicing
engineers can use for their own education and career growth and that
engineering instructors can mix and match to build customized courses,
textbooks and study guides.

The free material, all of it peer-reviewed to ensure high
quality, is available online via the popular
education site Connexions (www.cnx.org), which attracts more than 2 million visits
per month.

A novel aspect of the
collaboration is the rigorous peer review of the quality of the materials by
experts identified by the IEEE-SPS. Materials found to be of high quality are
certified and collected in the IEEE-SPS “lens,” which is available at
http://cnx.org/lenses/ieeesps/endorsements.

“Connexions’ lenses adapt the time-tested peer-review
process to open-access educational content, thus erasing a major concern for
academic authors,” said Joel Thierstein, executive director of Connexions.

While the open-education movement has grown rapidly in
recent years, critics have questioned how open-access publishers can ensure the
quality of freely authored and edited materials. An oft-proposed option is
adapting peer review — the process academic researchers have used for
centuries to vet and certify research papers and books.

Founded more than a decade ago, Connexions
is among the world’s most popular open-
education sites. Connexions’ repository of free educational content can be
employed, adapted and modified by anyone. The number of people using Connexions
has grown exponentially in recent years.

“All materials must pass thorough a rigorous quality
evaluation before they appear on the IEEE Signal Processing Society’s branded
portal in Connexions,” said Roxana Saint-Nom, chair of the society’s
Connexions Lens Subcommittee.

“While quality assurance of content was a key issue for
us, Connexions offers other tangible benefits for our members,” said SPS
President Mos Kaveh. “Compared with traditional publishing, Connexions is
much faster, has global reach and is perfectly suited for the rapid pace of
change in our field.”

In Connexions, anyone can create modules or “learning
objects.” Like Lego blocks, these modules can be assembled and reassembled
by users to create an almost endless variety of customized Web courses,
textbooks, study guides and curricula.

While Connexions welcomes contributions from anyone,
anywhere, it also features filtering layers called lenses. These lenses are what IEEE-SPS and
other groups use to certify content. While Connexions supplies the tools, each
organization develops its own processes for certifying contributed materials.
In the case of the IEEE-SPS, the society developed a lens with social software
features like a keyword tag cloud, discussion areas and tools that allow
authors to track the worldwide impact of their contributions. The society’s
lens can also single out exemplary signal processing-related content.

“Lenses are a key feature
that differentiates Connexions from other open-education projects,” said
Rice engineering professor and Connexions founder Richard Baraniuk, an IEEE-SPS
member. “We’re glad to see the IEEE Signal Processing Society taking
leadership both in establishing peer review for the open-access environment and
in encouraging their members to contribute open-access materials to
Connexions.”

IEEE, the Institute of Electrical
and Electronics Engineers Inc., is the world’s largest technical professional
organization; it has more than 350,000 members worldwide. The IEEE-SPS
represents the technical interests of its more than 15,000 members in 148
countries. It is widely known as a publisher of archival journals and sponsor
of major conferences across the broad landscape of signal processing science
and technology.