Leveling the higher ed playing field with free educational content

By Lynn Russo Whylly. Fourteen years ago, as a Victor E. Cameron professor of electrical and computer engineering at Rice University in Houston, Richard G. Baraniuk was frustrated that he couldn’t find the ideal book for his class. He knew there were tens of dozens of other professors out there with the same concern, so rather than write a book to suit his own needs, in 1999, he solved a wider audience’s needs by founding Connexions, a platform for making high-quality educational content available for free on the web and at a very low cost in print.
Baraniuk, now Rice’s director of the Connexions and OpenStax initiatives, is UBTech 2014’s keynote speaker on Monday, June 16, where he will talk about “Disruptive Innovation with Open Education.” Through his research in machine learning, he is working to enhance textbooks for OpenStax College, a nonprofit organization supported by Rice that is committed to improving student access to free, quality learning materials. We spoke with Baraniuk about the future of open educational content. More...