OpenStax CNX

» see cnx.org as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Turkish engineering education in my university years ran on the photocopier. A course had a foreign textbook nobody could afford, so the department kept one copy and the shop on the corner sold you a bound stack of pages at a fraction of the cover price. Everybody did it, everybody knew it was not legal, and nobody had an alternative to offer. Connexions was the alternative, it existed the entire time I was a student, and I never once heard its name.

Richard Baraniuk started it at Rice University in 1999. He taught signal processing, and the observation behind the whole project is a signal processing observation: the textbook is a container, not the content, and the container is the part that makes the content expensive and impossible to change. So he broke it up. The unit on Connexions was the module, a page or two on exactly one idea, written in an XML markup called CNXML so it could be indexed and reassembled by machine.

Modules gathered into collections, and a collection was a course or a book depending on how you looked at it. Everything carried a Creative Commons attribution license from the start, years before that was a normal thing for academic material, which meant an instructor in one country could take a module written in another, translate it, fix the example that made no sense locally and publish the result without asking anybody. The platform software, Rhaptos, was open source too.

It worked at a scale that surprises people who have never heard of it. By 2006 the servers were handling sixteen million hits a month from a hundred and fifty seven countries. By 2010 it was drawing between one and one and a half million visitors a month, and the catalog passed eighteen thousand modules assembled into more than thirteen hundred collections across roughly forty languages. This was a university project with no marketing and no consumer brand, running the largest open education repository in the world.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the module idea ~

The module was right and it was also the reason the thing never became a household name. What a teacher wants at eight in the morning is a book with chapters in order and problem sets at the end. What Connexions offered was a well organized pile of parts and the freedom to assemble them, which is more work than most people teaching four courses can take on. The users who loved it loved it completely, and the users who wanted a book bounced off.

Rice understood this and answered it in 2012 with OpenStax, which used the same infrastructure to publish finished, peer reviewed, professionally edited college textbooks for free. Those books went into thousands of institutions and have saved students a genuinely large amount of money. They also settled the argument: the container turned out to matter after all, and the successful product was the one that put the modules back into a book shape before handing it over.

~ how it actually ended ~

The end came in pieces over two years. The legacy authoring platform, the part where community members wrote and edited their own material, was retired on 30 June 2020. The wider CNX platform followed in August 2022, and the project was formally dissolved on 21 December 2022. The name had already changed once, from Connexions to OpenStax CNX in April 2014, which in hindsight was the announcement of which half was going to survive.

The content was not deleted. Rice moved the archive into its own research repository, OpenStax published directions to what it holds, and the Internet Archive has the rest. That is a better ending than most sites in this list get, and it is still a demotion. A living repository where a lecturer in Nairobi could rewrite a module about diodes and hand it back is now a set of files you download, which is what a textbook already was.

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