Supporting the Life Cycle of Scholarly Work

From research to the classroom

What students are learning today is often the result of cutting edge research in the past, and what advanced students are learning and incorporating is often today's research. So we are making it easier for content to move from publication in open research journals to publication in the Connexion open education repository. We are collaborating with the Public Knowledge Project, makers of OJS (Open Journal System) software, to support exporting content from journals and importing it to Connexions. The two teams are each implementing SWORD (Simple Web Service Offering Repository Deposit) to accomplish the transfer. Connexions SWORD support design is shown on our development site and implementation began in March.

From Connexions to reuse anywhere

We collect all sorts of statistics about use of the Connexions content from Connexions website, but often students and teachers download the content in various formats and use it remotely. Connexions explicitly supports reuse of content inside OR outside the repository. We try to make it easy to use the content in whatever way is most appropriate for educators and learners. But, we still want to know when the content is downloaded. Our current Google Analytics setup doesn't provide that information and so we have updated the code to collect information about content downloads. Testing is underway on the statistics enhancements. As an added benefit, consistent use of analytics across services makes comparisons and research on content usage more accurate.