Author Guide

This author guide is provided for those who are interested in preparing content themselves. Please note that our project support specialists are here to help. They can provide turn key services to prepare and import your content. Contact them today by emailing help@ieeecnx.org.

Connexions’ education content is organized into smallish, self-contained “modules” and larger “collections” woven from modules.

For your convenience, we have prepared a suite of helpful materials to guide you through the author process. The authoring suite contains templates for use with LaTeX, MS Word, and Open Office as well as a more in-depth guide to authoring in Connexions.

Modular content

Modules are written so that they are fairly self-contained, either addressing a single, simple topic or a single aspect of a more complex topic. For example, an explanation of fast convolution could be broken down into instruction on the fast Fourier transform, circular convolution, and achieving linear convolution from circular convolution using overlap add and overlap save (zero-padding), yielding three modules. An instructor wishing to compose an explanation of fast convolution could search the Connexions repository for pre-existing modules on these topics and then use those modules that suit her needs. The instructor might create her own introductory module and add a module explaining a concept for which she could find no pre-existing module or for which she had her own, alternate presentation.

Collections

A collection is an e-course or e-textbook, an ordered folder containing modules organized into chapters, sections and sub-sections. For examples of collections in Connexions, please see the “Fundamentals of Electrical Engineering” and “Digital Signal Processing: A User’s Guide” collections.

Creating modules based on pre-existing content

Creating modules from scratch in Connexions is fairly straightforward, as authors can adopt a modular organization from the outset. Importing pre-existing materials, such as books, research papers, and course notes, can be a bit more challenging due to their linear nature. Chapters, sections, and subsections can each provide structure for decomposing a larger work into modular chunks, depending on their relative sizes. In general, a module should focus on a single main topic and be no more than a few pages in length. With this rule of thumb and the original structure of the material, a modularization scheme usually presents itself after a little thought. Even if such imported content is not perfectly modularized in Connexions from the outset, it is likely to evolve in that direction through re-use by third-party authors.

Importing your Content into Connexions The steps to importing content into Connexions can be summarized as follows:

1. Modularize your content.
2. Group the modules into chapters, sections etc.
3. Provide subjects, keywords, and summary for indexing the material.

For each module, import your content from its original format (MS Word, Open Office, LaTeX) into CNXML, Connexions’ XML markup format.In more detail, Connexions provides a number of avenues for creating content. Authors can create new online materials using online editing tools, or they can use conversion tools to automatically port source materials from MS Word, Open Office, and LaTeX . When preparing materials for conversion into CNXML, authors should first determine how the material should be broken into modules (modularization). For each module, a set of meta-data must be provided to aid in indexing the module for search purposes. This includes the module title, the language in which the module is written, module keywords, a summary of the module content, and the subject area(s) of the module (one or more of “Arts”, ”Business”, ”Humanities”, ”Mathematics and Statistics”, ”Science and Technology”, or “Social Sciences”).

In addition to modularization, authors must also determine the structure needed to re-assemble their modules into a “collection” in Connexions. Authors may also integrate multi-media supplements (Flash objects, audio and video files, Java applets, etc.) with the text of the source material. For further details, please see the tutorial describing the module authoring process. IEEE-SPS authors will likely be particular interested in the Connexions LaTeX importer. Finally, authors with questions regarding the authoring process are invited to email the project support teams at help@ieeecnx.org.