Connexions

Web Page: https://trac.rhaptos.org/trac/rhaptos/wiki/Google%20Summer%20of%20Code%202012/Projects

Mailing List: mailto:rhaptos@cnx.rice.edu

Connexions is legos for education.

Connexions is an open-source platform that enables authors, teachers, and learners to create, share, use, and remix educational materials from a globally accessible, open-access repository of knowledge. Connexions strives to bring people back into the educational equation; particularly those who have been "shut out" of the publishing world. Connexions invites everyone to participate, not just as consumers of educational content but also as active contributors to a shared global repository. Connexions reduces the time lag between producing learning materials and getting them into the hands of learners and enables instructors to rapidly customize web courses and textbooks.

All of the content in the Connexions repository is available for free via the web and is remixable under a Creative Commons Attribution license. Roughly 1 million readers visit the site each month and even more download books, e-books, and courses from outlets like iTunesU. Lenses enable organizations to review and select high-quality materials to be endorsed, recommended, categorized, and aligned to standards. All of this functionality is packaged as Rhaptos, the open source software running the Connexions site.

Projects

• Donate Now Campaign The project aims to provide people more places to contribute and engage people thus enabling more people to donate. Thus the methods of donation has to be very simple and easy and should be visible in such a way that more people contribute and thus make Connexions work more sustainable.
• Flash Card Android App Creating an Android app that will automatically generate and display flash cards based on the glossary of a collection/module. The app would use up-to-date Android elements (ActionBar, Fragments, etc.) and may interface with the existing Connexions app in some way.
• Slide Importer client using the OERPub publishing API Build a web client to import slides into Connexions and upload them to a service like SlideShare or Google Docs to render them as embeds. The client should be able to create a module template with introductory paragraphs and should be uploaded to Connexions using the publishing API. Slides should be printable and should be compatible to mobile/tablet views.
• Yanchao Ye Google Summer Of Code Student Application The ultimate goal of this proposal is to add a mobi ebook-conversion module to the Rhaptos project, so that we can produce beautifully-formatted ebooks on kindle platform and reading applications. I want to modify the existing epub module by writing some scripts to convert the source data to a kindle-friendly format, according to epub specification, mobi specification and kindle publishing guidelines.