Engineering professor recognized for pioneering open-education via Connexions

BY PATRICK KURP
Special to the Rice News

Rice University’s Richard Baraniuk is one of six winners of a 2011 World Innovation Summit for Education (WISE) award presented by the Qatar Foundation. Baraniuk is the Victor E. Cameron Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and director and founder of Connexions.

	RICHARD BARANIUK

The annual WISE award recognizes “innovative educational projects from around the world.” This year’s theme was “Transforming Education: Investment, Innovation and Inclusion.”

Baraniuk joined the Rice faculty in 1993 and six years later founded Connexions, one of the first repositories of free, open-source textbooks via the Web. Connexions is among the largest open-education platforms; it makes available more than 19,000 modules (textbooks, lessons) used by more than 2 million people each month.

Baraniuk plans to attend the WISE Summit Nov. 1-3 in Doha, Qatar, where he and the other winners will each receive a $20,000 prize. Previous award winners have included such academics as Cecilia d’Oliveira, executive director of MIT’s OpenCourseWare, and nongovernmental organizations like Smallholder Farm Rural Radio in Nigeria.

The Qatar Foundation for Education, Science and Community Development was founded in 1995.

–Patrick Kurp is a science writer in the George R. Brown School of Engineering.