Richard Nantel

Last month, The Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University announced its annual Berkman Awards for outstanding contributions to the Internet’s impact on society. One of the winners this year was Rice University’s Richard Baraniuk.

Professor Baraniuk won the award for launching Connexions, a public learning content management system (LCMS) that allows teachers to share digital resources and learning content, modify them as required, and provide them online under a Creative Commons license. This free, open-source platform is a building block toward a system of open educational resources.

The content in Connexions is presented in two formats:

• Modules, which are like small “knowledge chunks,” or learning objects
• Collections, groups of modules structured into books or course notes or for other uses

The site reports that it presently contains “5,690 reusable modules woven into 339 collections” and covers a very wide range of topics of interest to anyone. Readers of this blog may benefit from the following courses on the topic of learning and technology:

• Best Practices in Online Teaching – Pulling It All Together – Teaching Blended Learning Courses (m15048)
• Best Practices in Online Teaching – During Teaching – Promote Active Learning (m14977)
• Learning Design and Open Source Teaching (m14733)
• Building a Learning Community: Democratic Values (m12921)

Many more courses on online learning are available here.

Mr. Baraniuk spoke at TEDS back in 2006 about how digital learning content such as that found in Connexions will replace academic textbooks. His talk was titled “Goodbye, textbooks; hello, open-source learning.” A video of this presentation is available here.