Interview: Joel Thierstein, Executive Director of Connexions
David Geer recently spoke with Joel Thierstein, Associate Provost, Rice University, and Executive Director of the Connexions Project, a place to view and share educational material made of small knowledge chunks called modules that can be organized as courses, books, reports, etc. Following is an edited transcript of that conversation.
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David Geer: So tell us, what is the Connexions Project?
Joel Thierstein: We are a two-faceted operation. We've got a repository of open access educational information, which is formed in kind of modules, which are smaller units. And then their authors, or teachers, come in and put them together into what we call courses. The other part of our project is the platform side. This is the delivery mechanism by which the repository information, or all the information stored in our storage facilities, is distributed to the consumer.
All the information in our repository and our platform is open to the public. Anybody who has access to the Internet can access all of our information. Our material is licensed under what they call a creative commons license. You can use it to do anything you want, including make a profit for yourself. However, we do require that you attribute the material to its original author.
Geer: It sounds like you've got a great resource for various parts of the world where they have some teachers, they have some equipment, but they can't fully fund the content.
Thierstein: We span the full spectrum of users. Folks, as you described, who are the economically- or educationally-deprived who can't afford to produce their own materials, can come to Connexions and download everything for free.
We also have the other end of the spectrum, which is the highest academic pursuit. The Connexions founder is Rich Baraniuk, originally a Rice University professor in digital signal processing. He and his colleagues have formed a user group on our site to push the envelope of digital signal processing. The way that works is, traditionally, if you want to put out information to your colleagues, you publish a book or a journal article. You're looking at, at best, for a journal article, six months; more than likely, it's a year or two. A book is definitely two years. And by the time the book comes out, everything you've put in the book is out of date, in a field like digital signal processing that advances so fast. And so Rich decided that he needed some way to move the discipline along faster, and so he put together this Connexions platform and software, and set up this repository for materials and education.
Geer: And I understand that an organization called Teachers Without Borders is taking interest. First, give us a brief description of what Teachers Without Borders is.
Thierstein: Teachers Without Borders is a global organization that helps teachers around the world better their teaching skills. They help them to improve the way that they pass information along to students. They are deployed in, I think, 119, 120, countries right now. Traditionally, in this country, we think of educators as being people who are well-schooled, they've been through at least an undergraduate program, most have been through a masters program. That's not necessarily the case around the world, and we forget about that, living here in the United States. The teachers in, say, Africa may be somebody who has been to elementary school, and maybe secondary school. In some of the remote areas, that's as good as it gets. And so when you come into a classroom, those teachers have no idea what to do. They don't know how to structure curriculum; they don't know how to do any of the normal things that we assume that, when we drop our kids off at school in the morning, as I just did with mine, the teachers know what they're doing when you leave. And Teachers Without Borders, then, is the organization that kind of comes along and helps teachers in remote parts of the world, to kind of give them a better understanding of how to teach.
One of the things that they were looking for is an end-to-end global deployment of educational content. They have people on the ground, and our distribution system ends at the end of the wire. So if you get to the end of the Internet, it kind of stops. Theirs starts there, and so it's a natural partnership where they would be able to get their materials on our site, and distribute them globally. It really is a nice, end-to-end distribution platform for their materials.
Geer: [Is there] anything else about how Connexions will provide Teachers Without Borders with something that they can't get anywhere else?
Thierstein: We have a print engine. As courses are put together, you can either keep them together online, in which case there's no printing mechanism, or you can print them on your own printer, or you can print through our print partner, an on-demand publisher in the Silicon Valley area. You can receive it anywhere in the world, in the normal shipping course.
Geer: I understand you have some anecdotal evidence of how homeschoolers are taking advantage of Connexions.
Thierstein: We do. We've had homeschoolers, particularly in the area of music, which is not necessarily the most populated area of content on the Web, at least for certain age groups. And we've got a nice, early high school, middle school, and late elementary school curriculum for homeschoolers on the web. The homeschoolers have found it to be very useful, and it's one of our more popular modules. This particular set of materials also gets significant amount of global use. [For example], several people in Mongolia have discovered the Connexions site and have downloaded the material for their kids, and they're now learning music theory in Mongolia. They're also home schooled because there is no school; they're nomadic people. So it's an interesting use of our site.
Geer: And the benefits of Connexions to the Vietnam area?
Thierstein: Vietnam has actually deployed Connexions as its digital education platform throughout the county, and this was done through a project through the Vietnam Education Foundation, that again is interested in setting up educational opportunities for the Vietnamese. This is a fantastic project. They are beginning to not only use the materials in Connexions as they are, and translate it, but they're also beginning to develop their own materials, which is, again, one of the purposes and one of the exciting parts about Connexions - is that it's instant feedback from the user. And so the user, if they don't like, let's say, a module, they can take that material, develop their own module, and it becomes enhanced. Let's say the Vietnamese decide that they're going to take a particular part of mathematics or engineering or history, and say, this is our version of how that works, the old version remains the same. That's the difference between us and Wikipedia; the old version will remain the same, and Vietnam will have their version posted as well. And so the next user, let's say, China, comes along and says, well, we like the Vietnamese version better; and then the Ukrainians come along and say, no we like the original version better. And so different people can take different parts of the curriculum and use it for their own purposes.
Geer: What challenges remain?
Thierstein: We have a couple of challenges. The IT challenges continue. As part of that, development of content that actually uses the power of the platform is one of our biggest challenges at the moment. XML is a powerful tool. In the XML world, you can write a particular set of code that will define an oxygen molecule, and you can tag that oxygen molecule and tell it that it's going to behave as an oxygen molecule when it encounters something else, let's say a hydrogen molecule, that you've written the same way. And so when you put the oxygen and hydrogen together, they will behave appropriately because they know what they're supposed to do, because you've entered all that metadata into their code. And so when you put an oxygen molecule and two hydrogen molecules together, you kind of know what the answer's going to be. It'd better be water. When you describe that, you can then apply that to, say, chemistry or physics. You have an incredibly powerful learning tool, because then you can get the kids to experiment on their own. And it doesn't matter what the kids do with it. As long as you have the tagging appropriate for the use, it's amazing.
Geer: I understand that usage grew by 70% last year, and the site currently attracts about 500,000 unique visitors per month.
Thierstein: We continue to experience growth throughout the project in all areas. We've got about 500,000 unique visitors per month. It's a little bit higher for the nine months during the academic year in the Western Hemisphere; it's a little bit lower in the summer. The growth, at some point, will become exponential, when we start to see the power of XML being used, [and] when we start to see the content in the site reach critical mass.
Geer: And finally, what are you working on for the future of Connexions?
Thierstein: Short-term, we're working on perfecting the endorsement system. And what that is is that authors will be able to come in, or organizations will be able to come into the site and say, I vetted this material, and it's good material, and I will put my seal of approval on it. Now we're open and anybody can change any of the information they want to. Unlike Wikipedia, the original information stays present in the system. You essentially, then create a secondary, or spin-off module. But the endorsement would then tag whichever module you want, and you'd be able to maintain the quality of the information and you wouldn't have to keep going back in and changing it because your endorsement would stay with whatever the version is that you endorsed. That's a pretty significant advancement for us. Long-term we are looking to grow the content, increase the number of modules in the system. As that increases and grows, use will increase and grow.
Geer: Thank you for speaking with us today, Joel. If you would like to learn more about the Connexions project, surf to http://cnx.org.