3.3: Connexions
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Connexions is an environment for collaboratively developing, freely sharing, and rapidly publishing scholarly content on the Web. Its Content Commons contains educational materials for a variety of users, including children to college students to professionals, which is organized in small modules that are easily connected into larger courses. All content is free to use and reuse under what it calls “Creative Commons attributable” licence. Connexions’ philosophy is “Sharing is good”. Guided by this philosophical principle and informed by the logic that people need not re-invent the wheel, the creators of Connexions have made it possible for people to share their knowledge, so “they can select from the best ideas to create the most effective learning materials”.
Another online learning project with a huge potential for shared global learning and instruction is the Carnegie Mellon Online Learning Initiative (OLI) project. The project which grew out of collaboration among cognitive scientists, experts in human computer interaction and seasoned faculty aims to increase access to education, “enhancing the quality of instruction and providing a model for a new generation of online courses and course materials that teach more effectively and appeal to students more powerfully than anything in existence today”. The project is unique in that it adds to online education the crucial elements of instructional design grounded in cognitive theory, formative evaluation for students and faculty, and iterative course improvement based on empirical evidence. OLI courses include a number of innovative online instructional components such as: cognitive tutors, virtual laboratories, group experiments, and simulations.
The United Kingdom’s Open University is one of leaders in the field of online learning. In fact, OU is the pioneer in the field, having been making learning materials freely available as early as 1969 through its partnership with the British Broadcasting Corporation. The OU’s OpenLearn was launched in 2006 to open access to education for all and it is designed for distance and elearning. It now boasts of 700,000 users globally. It incorporates videoconferencing technology, FlashMeeting for seminars and collaboration, Compendium (knowledge maps), MSG (instant messaging), as well as self-assessment tools.