Welcome to the Connexions System - For Students 2.4 2001/08/16 2002/08/23 Elizabeth Bartmess bartmess@alumni.rice.edu Elizabeth Bartmess bartmess@alumni.rice.edu Allison Heath aheath@rice.edu Graham Hull grhull@rice.edu Brent Michael Hendricks brentmh@rice.edu connexions introduction roadmap students Introduces students to the Connexions system.

The Project The Connexions Project creates and maintains software for constructing and navigating online courses. We are attempting to make navigating courses and finding topic-related information as quick, intuitive, and convenient as possible. This is a complex goal, and we are approaching it through iterations. Many of our iterations are based on your feedback. As you use our system, please send us feedback if you find things you don't like, or if you have an idea for something we ought to be doing but aren't. (Just click on the "Submit a BUG REPORT" or "Submit a SUGGESTION" link at the bottom of this page or at the bottom of any page in one of our courses.)

What You Need Two things are needed to view courses using the Connexions system: The Mozilla web browser and the Connexions Roadmap (an add-on to the Mozilla web browser).

Why Mozilla? Mozilla is a open-source browser that was branched off from Netscape. In fact, it has been successful enough that Netscape 6 and above are actually Mozilla with a Netscape label. (Current versions are much more functional than Netscape 6, which was a very early version of Mozilla.) Mozilla has a major advantage for online learning: It has the capacity for easily displaying math. We currently only support Mozilla (and Netscape 6 and above, since they are Mozilla). We hope to support Internet Explorer at some point, but we do not plan to do so this fall.

The Connexions Roadmap The Connexions roadmap was designed with the intent of giving you quick access to any part of a course and to several useful tools, such as our search engine, a dictionary, and quick access to help pages such as these. It can be installed into your Mozilla browser in the same way you would install a plug-in (by clicking on a link).

Accessing (or Installing) Mozilla and the Connexions Roadmap If you want to install Mozilla and the Roadmap on your home or office computer, or if you already have Mozilla but just need to install the Roadmap, click here. If you are a student at Rice University and want to use Mozilla and the Roadmap on an Owlnet computer, click here. If you are a student at the University of Illinois, click here.