Connexions Development Platform Roadmap (2007-2009)

Yearly Target Version
Prepared by: Katherine Fletcher
Last Update: (Medium update Jul07, Minor update Oct07)

• Introduction
• Connexions Purpose
• Themes and Strategic Goals
  • Defining Themes
    1. Accessible to all
    2. Reusable and customizable
    3. Interactive education that enhances learning
  • Usability Themes
    4. Easy to use
    5. High quality content can be found
    6. Community around content
  • Strategic Goals
    1. Thriving/growing community of learners.
    2. Thriving/growing repository
    3. Information architecture standard
    4. Thriving open source development community
• Progress Report (Mar and July 2007)
• Development Milestones Roadmap
• Summary of Major Objectives by Year
• CNX Deliverables and Milestone Chart (Source spreadsheet , Web)
• Detailed Development Themes and Priorities (Document description , Source document, PDF version ) This document shows all the development milestones organized according to the themes and strategic goals that they support.

Introduction

The Connexions development roadmap is intended to be a living document guiding development and investment of time, money and effort toward reaching strategic long term goals that achieve our core purpose. This roadmap documents the platform and software development and does not address the equally important goals of content development, content seeding, and content nurturing. The roadmap starts with a brief introduction to Connexions followed by a set of themes and strategic goals. These defining themes and strategic goals guide the development priorities over the next two years. We give a brief summary of recent progress toward the goals. Finally, we present a two year development roadmap that describes planned activity aligned with the themes and priorities and delivery milestones.

Connexions Mission

Connexions is a unique web-based teaching and learning environment that aims to change the way we develop and use learning materials. It is a living content commons of diverse educational materials that span the knowledge continuum, are modularized for easy reuse, and are available free-of-charge to anyone in the world. Authors can create “modules” of information – smallish documents intended to communicate a concept, a procedure, or a set of questions. An instructor can string modules together to create a web course, textbook, or any other type of collection, or can customize materials exactly as they need. Learners can read and interact with materials online and will be able to print books and burn CD's of materials. Anyone can be an author, an instructor, or a learner, and indeed may be all three.

In addition to the ability to create, customize, collect, and print, Connexions documents use a document XML called CNXML designed to bring the contents of the document to life. For instance, math equations are not just pictures of math; they can be used as inputs to mathematical processing. Although not yet supported, music can be included in an XML that preserves the meaning of the notes and can be played, changed, and replayed directly in the browser or from a CD included with a book. Similarly, chemical equations could be shown in 3-dimensions based on the chemical structure. Many other use cases are envisioned for data semantically encoded in XML, and the potential power (largely as-yet unrealized) of live-data is truly revolutionary.

Connexions challenges the current notion of a “textbook” making it available in an open format where individual sections can be combined, recombined, contextualized, and reused. All Connexions content is open-licensed using the Creative Commons attribution license; all Connexions tools are free and open-source.

Themes and Strategic Goals

We derive the following overarching and defining themes from Connexions mission and use them to guide the features and architecture of the Connexions platform.

1. Accessible to all world-wide.
   
2. Reusable and customizable.
3. Interactive and explorative education that enhances learning.

Strategic Goals : The strategic goals are the metrics of success for achieving the defining themes in a way that significantly impacts education and learning in the world.

1. Thriving, growing community of learners.
2. Thriving, growing repository of content in diverse subjects at all levels.
3. Information architecture is a world-wide standard.
4. Healthy community of open-source developers working on platform enhancement.

Connexions content commons must attract authors so that the content grows and improves, and must attract learners and teachers so the content can have significant educational impact. For communities to adopt the rich XML format that provides the power behind the content, the information architecture must be clear, concise, and compelling and become the standard by which text-book like material is produced. Finally, as an open-source project, the functionality will cease to expand if we fail to attract a community of developers that nurture and enhance the platform. Connexions currently has a community of learners in the range of 300,000 to 600,000 learners per month with a content repository of roughly 4698 modules and 272 collections. Strategic goals III and IV are at zero baseline currently.

Usability Themes: These Usability Themes are designed to achieve the Defining Themes and meet the Strategic Goals.

4. Easy to use: For the site to be accessible world-wide (A) and attract a thriving community of learners (I) and healthy growing content repository (II), the platform and tools must be easy to understand, easy to navigate, and easy to work with. Simple tasks should be obvious and fast; complicated tasks should be possible, non-tedious, and achievable by committed authors.
5. High quality content can be created and found by the metrics important to specific communities: To attract a thriving community of learners (I), the content must be of high quality, and to maintain the defining theme that the entire platform is accessible to all (A) , quality must be determined post-publication. To enhance reusability and customizability (B), external organizations will want to determine quality according to metrics meaningful to their community of practice.
6. Rich community features around content: Community features can increase interactive learning (C), increase accessibility to content by allowing communities to vet and recommend it (A) and increase strategic goals I and II for thriving learning communities and a rich, rapidly growing content repository.

The themes and priorities affect our community of learners, authors and teachers in different ways, some being more important to learners, some to teachers, and others to authors.

• Learning
  • Easy to understand and use (D)
  • Accessible to all world-wide (A)
  • Interactive and explorative education that enhances learning (C)
  • Rich community features around content (F)
  • Connexions has a thriving, growing community of learners (I)
  • Connexions has a thriving, growing repository of content in diverse subjects at all levels. (II)
• Teaching
  • Easy to use (D)
  • Accessible to all world-wide (A)
  • Reusable and customizable (B)
  • Interactive and explorative education that enhances learning (C)
  • High quality content can be found (E)
  • Connexions has a thriving, growing repository of content in diverse subjects at all levels. (II)
• Authoring
  • Easy to use (D)
  • Easy to collaborate (D, F)
  • Reusable, customizable, easy to keep up-to-date (B)

Detailed Development Themes and Priorities

This document shows all the development milestones organized according to the themes and strategic goals that they support.The document is coordinated with the Milestones and Deliverables chart and with the release information per target in this document. The document is available externally in the following formats: Source document, PDF version.

Overview of Recent Progress (July 2007)

In March 2007, Connexions released a major upgrade to the learner/reader interface as the first step of overhauling the user interface and functionality of the site. The March progress report is available in an Appendix.

In July 2007, Connexions released the first version of lenses, which provide a custom views of the content in the commons, allowing for post-publication review and recommendation by trusted third parties. Additionally we installed a new bug tracking and milestone tracking system that is publicly available at https://trac.rhaptos.org/trac/rhaptos

Each of the features listed below are described in more detail below.

June: Easy to use (Studies) (Theme D)

• Naive user study : Identified quick fixes that will help even first time authors while we develop a more robust editing system. Visual cues were misleading users in inserting paragraphs and bulleted lists. Keyword entry instructions missed. Previewing results hard to find.
• Author roundtable: Identified several quick fixes that will improve authoring -- ability to add section in Edit-in-Place, auto-generation of ID's when authors leave them out, help with import and export of modules containing multiple images and resources.

June-July: Thriving open-source community (Strategic Goal IV)

• External installation possible, collaboration through widely-used open bug tracking system possible: Install from paper instructions only at Jacobs University (Formerly University of Bremen), and install on Redhat system at Penn State University. Trac bug system installed and in use.

July: High quality content can be found by the metrics important to specific communities (Theme E)

• Lenses V1 Introduced: Individuals and organizations can select, tag and describe content. Organizations can endorse content.

Detailed Progress Report

June: Easy to use (Studies) (Theme D)

• Naive user study : A graduate student in psychology studied 100 users working with Connexions authoring interface. Her purpose was to study the effects of sample size on problem identification and her results are now a part of her thesis. She shared her high level results and showed videos of users creating a module, agreeing to the CC license, importing a Word document and then making some edits using the Connexions web editor, called Edit-in-Place. We identified several quick fixes that we will implement between July and November 07 ahead of the authoring workflow reorganization, because their implementation will have a high impact on author success. Visual cues were misleading users in inserting paragraphs and bulleted lists. Items that are not "live" appear live, and users often click on the wrong insertion point when trying to insert paragraphs. Keyword entry instructions were missed and can be improved. Study participants had a hard time finding how to preview their work. Because the study is repeatable, we have access to a set of results to compare with results of future usability studies.
  
  
• Author roundtable: Rice authors were invited to a round table discussion led by the Connexions usability researcher. Six authors attended on June 5th and our usability researcher will conduct another of these late in the summer. The authors had concerns with the workflow especially regarding author "roles" and these will be addressed as part of the workflow redesign. Additionally, however, it was clear that we need to address some basic editing difficulties as soon as possible. A major overhaul of the editing interface is planned, but the complete overhaul will take a year, so we identified several quick (relatively) fixes that will improve authoring-- the ability to add sections in Edit-in-Place (Nov07), auto-generation of ID's when authors leave them out, and help with import and export of modules containing multiple images and resources. These will be implemented between the July and November targets.

June and July: Thriving Open Source Community (Strategic Goal IV)

• External installation possible, Trac bug system installed: We hired a consultant to enable external installation of Rhaptos (Connexions software without the Connexions branding), and to enhance our current development environment so that external developers can participate. External installation is the minimum requirement for external development and eventually for distributed repositories. The first steps toward this goal were scheduled for Nov 07, however, we found a talented consultant and had two potentially useful collaborators interested in summer work so we accelerated this milestone. The consultant and a junior Connexions developer who recently moved to California worked on these goals together. The consultant and developer began the process of trying to download, build, and install Rhaptos and fixed each hurdle they ran into. The consultant documented the process until he could reliably reproduce the entire procedure and then we sent the instructions to a developer at Jacobs University who was able to replicate the install in 2-3 hours from the instructions without help . He used a clean Linux environment of the same flavor that we used here at Connexions. A developer at Penn State University then used these steps and adapted them to the RedHat Linux operating system. (Note: Connexions is undergoing a major Plone upgrade and the installation process for Rhaptos collaborators will have to be updated.) The consultant also installed Trac, a commonly used bug system that our developers have now been using very successfully for two months.

July: High quality content can be found by the metrics important to specific communities (Theme E)

• Lenses Version 1 Introduced: Individuals and organizations can select, tag and describe content and organizations can endorse content and collect affiliated content. Endorsments and affiliations show up prominently on the content and member lists show up as well, but less obtrusively. Lenses enable both organizations and individuals to give their stamps of approval to content in the Connexions repository, allowing for user-driven quality control of Connexions modules and collections. Through these lenses, Connexions users can also provide their own tags and descriptions for items in the repository. The lens tagging can be used to attach a community specific vocabulary to a set of content. Descriptions can be used for reviews, information of interest to groups and communities, or simple instructions for use. A list of all publicly-viewable lenses can be found at cnx.org/lenses. The subset of endorsement lenses is at cnx.org/endorsements, with affiliation lenses at cnx.org/affiliations and member list lenses at cnx.org/memberlists.

Connexions Milestones Roadmap

• Milestones Introduction
• Summary of Major Objectives by Year
• CNX Deliverables and Milestone Chart (Source spreadsheet , Web)

Introduction

The milestones below do NOT include content support or system administration. Content support entails interaction with Rice University Press, Rice authors, and high-profile authors such as Catherine Schmidt-Jones. Ongoing system administration includes maintaining the Connexions online presence, monitoring and tracking usage and performance, maintaining the development environment, and response to infrastructure emergencies.

Note: A separate document (Connexions Themes and Priorities Source document, PDF version ) contains detailed themes and priorities (Defining Themes, Usability Themes, and Strategic Goals) and relates all the development listed within each milestone to the themes and priorities the development supports. The document also contains estimated completion dates matching those here and in the milestone chart. Some tasks in the Themes and Priorities document have not yet been scheduled, pending funding and higher level priorities decisions.

Summary of Major Objectives by Year

Summary for Year 1: (Jul07 - Jul08) Usability (using content, customizing content, creating content), Programmability, Printing, Lenses and Communities

• Usability: The work over the next year overhauls the entire user interface (learner: find and explore, teacher: collect and customize, and author: create original material). Usability is absolutely critical to our strategic goals of increasing the use, creation, and improvement of the educational materials in Connexions.
  • Learner : Using Content [Mar 07]-- The March 07 release began the process with an initial overhaul of the learner (reader) interface. The March progress report in the Appendix has more detail.
  • Teacher: Customizing Content -- The User Interface team will be completely overhauling the author workspace and workgroups interface and at the same time providing high level design recommendations for improvements to the editing interface for creating original works. From initial studies of naive and experienced users, high impact changes to the current editing environment will be implemented since the complete overhaul of the editing environment will take a full year. The NSF/National Instruments DSP grant will be supporting improvements to MathML editing, LaTeX editing and LabVIEW integration.
  • Author: Creating content: The YR1 target includes major improvements to creating and editing Connexions content. The team will complete the design and implementation of easy-to-use editing interfaces which may be implemented in-house or contracted.
• Programmability: Development Environment Improvements: Information Architecture upgrade, System Architecture improvements. The programmability goals ensure that external developers and projects can work with the Connexions content, the Connexions software, and can participate in development of the software and editing tools. A thriving open-source community around Rhaptos (the Connexions software) will ensure that the project has a future. We are currently at a baseline of zero for external participation and we must achieve three goals -- a development environment that external partners can use, an information architecture with clear API's that others can develop tools for, and a software architecture that is both clear and robust for eventual deployment of distributed repositories.
  • Development Environment Improvements: [Jul 07 v1] : We hired a consultant to overhaul the Rhaptos installation procedure and create instructions so that it can be installed (by experienced developers) without Connexions staff help. Significant progress was made, but this goal still requires significant work. The consultant configured and installed a bug system that is being used in house and can be used by outside developers as well to develop the Rhaptos software. The bug system is a window for the outside world into our development process and feature roadmap. Initial progress on these goals looks promising. Also key to maintaining our software development is upgrading to modern versions of component software that Rhaptos uses. The System Architect is upgrading Connexions to Plone 2.5, and we upgraded the database software used for search and browse in Mar 07.
  • Information Architecture: Our current information architecture (how modules, collections, and metadata are represented) has two limitations -- some important things cannot be expressed, and we do not have well architected API's for getting all the necessary information about modules and collections. The expressive limitations must be corrected in order to support important document and book constructs that authors need. The API's must be constructed to allow information exchange with other services, to support transforms of information in other representations, and to support external development of authoring tools.
  • System architecture : API's (Application Programming Interfaces) will be released for getting content into and out of Connexions. We will release as many as possible by as they become available, but the full API's won't release until the end of YR 1. These API's make possible external development of transform tools and client-side content editors, as well as providing convenient pathways for learning management systems and mobile platforms to engage with the content.
• Printing:
  • Print on demand of selected collections: A selection of the most popular collections at Connexions are currently being made available for print-on-demand through QOOP. The Connexions in-house LaTeX print tools are being used to create the collections and necessary hand-edits made to produce a high quality product. The PDF's generated will become out-of-date if authors update the component modules of the collections.
  • Assemble and print-on-demand V0.5-Beta [Nov 07] The LaTeX print tools will be upgraded to handle most common cases when printing collections so that collections can be assembled and printed with up to date materials. Some collections may not be satisfactorily printable through this system.
  • Assemble and print-on-demand V1 [Jul 08] Using the experience of the beta release, we will improve the assemble on demand printing to a version 1.0 service.
• Lenses and Quality Control:
  • Endorsements [Mar 07]: The March release rolled out support for 3rd party endorsements with a single participating organization, NCPEA.
  • Lenses V1 (Selecting, tagging, describing and sorting content) [Jul 07] Organizations and individuals can build lenses that display selected content and tags and descriptions applied by the lensing organization. When content is included in endorsement and affiliation lenses, information about the lens will appear in a Quality box when viewing the content. Lenses are described more fully in "Lenses: Proposed functional description and high level design" (PDF).
  • Lenses V2 (Viewing through and customizing lenses) and Branding A lensing organization can present their community with a view of the content where search and browse look only at their chosen content.
  • Lenses V3 (Cascading styles, behavior controls, and Trust Profiles) Support for enhanced customization of lenses, including style parameters and interface behaviors will be implemented. Trust Profiles provide a way for individuals and organizations to choose what information shows up preferentially in the "Quality Box", thus removing Connexions as an arbiter of quality.

Summary for Year 2 : (Nov 08 - Nov 09) Interactivity, Multimedia, Translation, Peer Review, Plan for Distributed Repositories

• The second year develops the crucial defining theme of "Interactive and explorative education that enhances learning" and starts on major new functionality for integrating reusable structured elements such as bibliography, glossary, question databases, images, and graphs, with a concentration on developing a robust question/answer integration. Year 2 will concentrate on interactive video, translation tools and peer review tools. Most of the functionality in Year 1 will need version 2 implementations with enhancements, refinements, and improvements based on lessons learned. Milestones in the second year have less associated detail and could change priorities depending on potential collaborations, funding sources, and creative inspiration. Also in year 2, planning for a distributed architecture begins.

Appendix: March 2007 Progress Report

• Overview of recent progress
• Detailed progress report

In March 2007, Connexions released a major upgrade to the learner/reader interface as the first step of overhauling the user interface and functionality of the site. Each of the features listed below are described in more detail below.

Overview of March 07 Progress

Easier to Understand and Use (Theme D)

• For learners:
  • Home page redesign: The home page was redesigned to focus on finding and creating content, and showcasing content in diverse areas to illustrate Connexions interdisciplinary nature.
  • Site Navigation: The basic site navigation was simplified and made ubiquitous, including adding it to content pages so that Google searchers that arrive on a particular module are encouraged to explore further about Connexions.
  • Browse and Search Improvements: Finding content was simplified, display of results was made more informative, and browsing and searching were integrated, reducing the number of different pages that needed to be navigated.
    • Six very basic subject categories were added so that learners can find content by subject area.
  • Module and Course/Collection Display: Module and course/collection display was simplified visually, made more readable, and Connexions terminology is used more consistently.
    • Navigating in a collection was made easier by having a table of contents that is available at all times and can be opened or closed as needed.
• For authors:
  • Site Navigation: Authors: Logging in for authoring was made simpler, clearer, and more uniform. A navigation tab to get to the author workspaces and workgroups was added.
  • Word Importer Improvement: The Word importer was repaired so that dramatically fewer Word documents cause the importer to fail and refuse to import any content. Equation editor math within Word documents will now import as MathML 1.0 equations.

March: High quality content can be found (Theme E)

• Endorsements: Partner organizations can choose content to endorse and those modules and collections show up as endorsed.
• Editor Role: Editor role added to support editors adopting content and polishing it.

Reusable and Customizable (Theme B)

• Translator role added: Translators can now be designated and displayed as translators, rather than as author

Detailed Progress Report (March 2007)

• Home page redesign:

  The new home page is designed to give clear, concise information about what Connexions is and what is possible with Connexions. The strong center visual shows two key capabilities -- finding content in many subject areas and creating original content. The new featured content section displays three content areas with representative pictures for visual interest. Various designs of the home page were user tested with friends, families and colleagues. Although the test subjects were not random, we selected users with varying knowledge of what Connexions is/does and asked them to attempt specific tasks. The selected design was driven by this process.

• Site navigation:
  Home, Content, About Us, Help
  Authoring Area, Ubiquitous Login Area box.

  The site navigation was simplified and added to all parts of the site. Previously, the site navigation did not show up when viewing content, so viewers coming from Google searches didn't even realize they were on a site with more to it, and experienced authors searching for content didn't have an obvious way back to other sections in the site or their authoring area after viewing content.

  An author login box was added to all non-content (modules and collections pages) so that logging in is easy to find everywhere. Author messages and information show up in that location when logged in.

• Integrated browse and search interface with added ability to browse by subject area.

  Browse and search were unified so that both can be found and used easily. The many different ways to browse were unified and results appear within the same page so it is easy to backup and browse in other ways. The Initial implementation of subjects uses 6 subject categories -- the ability to browse and search by subject area tested VERY strongly with our test subjects. It is clear that the depth of the subjects must be increased to make this feature really useful, but we felt like it was important to present as soon as possible given the strong reaction we got when testing.

• Improved search and search display.

Searchers can narrow the search to title, author, courses only, or within a subject area. An advanced search with more options is implemented but still needs a bit more user interface testing before being rolled out.

Search display shows all relevant information (title, author, abstract, language ...). Previously the display showed only the title, so it was often hard to tell whether you had what you wanted. The search display highlights the matching terms wherever they occur. The expanded versions of all the browse views also use the same display so our readers and authors have a consistent view of searched information no matter how it was obtained. The database was upgraded to the latest version which both provides some of this new functionality and is a step toward an easier Rhaptos installation.

• Redesigned module and course display including module within a course and table of contents of the collection. Simplified color and elements to make lensing easier.

  Clean look, simplified colors, easier to read: This work prepares the way for lenses. The Connexions content display was simplified considerably based on the need to have a supportable way to build custom lens looks for partners. The new look uses two related colors so partners can choose these for themselves and provide an appropriately sized lens logo.

  Module display improvements: Readability was improved by pulling the titles out of colored bars where they were less prominent. All author created content, including the author "related links" material is presented within the textual frame of the author's main content to make clear the distinction between Connexions generated related material and author content. The left navigation was split into sensible grouping: Content Actions, Endorsements, Related Material.

  Collection/Course display: Viewing a module from within a course or collection now displays the course title and author giving a clear indication of how courses/collections and modules work together. Small changes like using "Course by" and "Module by" help to reinforce Connexions terminology.

  Navigating a course or collection: The table of contents for a collection is now always available as the collection is being read. Since the table of contents can be long, the viewer can fold it up or expand it as needed.

• Word Importer Improvement

  The Word importer was improved in two significant ways. First, many more Word documents import into Connexions modules without error than before. When possible, errors that used to prevent import are instead handled in some way such that the rest of the content still imports. More significantly, math created with Equation Editor in Word successfully imports as MathML 1.0.

• Endorsements:

Partners can now endorse content by adding links to any modules and collections they want to recommend in a public bookmarking service called del.icio.us. The partner's del.icio.us account must be registered with Connexions and then when an endorsed module is viewed, the partner's endorsement shows up with it. Clicking on the partner link in the endorsement retrieves a page about the partner, as well as a list of all content they endorse. NCPEA is our first endorsing partner and instructions were developed to show them how to use a del.icio.us account and how to mark content. Connexions module Content Actions include Save to del.icio.us, making it easy for partners to maintain their own endorsements. Other readers can use the Add to del.icio.us link to collect bookmarks of modules they are interested in.

• Editor and Translator roles.

  Prior to this release authoring roles included author, maintainer, and licensor. We have added roles for editors on edited works, and translators so that these can be properly attributed without designating them as authors. The "Señales and Sistemas" course show the new translator feature.