Rhaptos: (adj) - stitched or sewn together (Ancient Greek)

Rhaptos is an collaborative authoring and publishing system built by Connexions for open-content educational materials.

A Rhaptos installation targets three types of users:

• Authors collaborate to write content in bite-sized chunks called "modules"
• Instructors arrange and recontextualize modules into sequences called "courses" -- think of them as online books
• Learners read and discuss content

Rhaptos Features

Work Areas

Rhaptos features private workspaces as well as shared, collaborative areas called workgroups. Content in a work area is not publicly visible until it is published in the repository.

Modules

Modules are the basic building block on content in the Rhaptos system. Each module maps to a single web page, but may also be viewed as a PDF. Modules have metadata like keywords and an abstract, may have multiple authors and a set of supplementary links. Modules are written in CNXML, but can import content from a variety of sources including Microsoft Word. Rhaptos included an easy-to-use web-based editor for modules called Edit-In-Place.

Collections or Courses

Collections allow authors and instructors to build a custom sequence of modules for their readers and students. Collections allow instructors to provide custom titles, supplementary links, and even mathematical notation for modules viewed in the context of the collection. The same module may be customized in completely different ways in different collections.

Repository

All content is stored under version control in the Rhaptos content repository. This allows earlier versions to be viewed and compared at any time. The repository can be browsed via the web by title, author, keyword, or popularity. It can also be queried using the Open Archives Initiative protocol or the OpenSearch protocol.

Collaboration

There are many ways authors can collaborate with Rhaptos:

Coauthorship

Colleagues who participate in content creation content can each be listed as an author

Additional maintainers

You can assign others to assist you in maintaining content in Connexions by granting them a maintainer role

Workgroups

You and your collaborators can create a workgroup and look over each others' content as you work, making comments before publishing. This tool also works well with the above methods

Suggest Changes

Even if you do not know the author of a specific piece of content, you can send a set of suggested edits (like a software patch)

Derive a Copy

If the author is not sympathetic to your suggestions, or if you want to take the content in a different direction, you can derive a copy and begin a new work based on the original. The original author will still get attribution for his or her work. Note that your new content will not automatically be updated if he or she makes changes to the original

See the Rhaptos Installation Guide

For more details see the Rhaptos architecture

For detailed instructions on using a Rhaptos installation, see the Connexions Tutorial and Reference