All materials in Connexions, including resources associated with TIMEA (Travelers in the Middle East Archive), are available for you to use and re-use freely so long as you attribute the source. For instance, you can link to Connexions modules from a course or personal web page, or print out modules for personal use or inclusion in a course reader. TIMEA modules explore the research process and the history and culture of the Middle East, using digitized texts, images and maps in the TIMEA online archive as case studies. We anticipate that TIMEA modules will be used in a variety of ways: by students who want to improve their research skills and knowledge of the Middle East, researchers investigating the culture and history of the Middle East, and instructors in disciplines such as archaeology, art history, literature, history, and Middle Eastern studies.
Navigating Modules
TIMEA modules in Connexions feature the TIMEA logo, which users can click to go to the TIMEA home page. In addition, these modules have their own unique look that marks them as being associated with TIMEA.
Since Connexions aims to show the linkages among concepts, the left toolbar provides several kinds of links to related material: examples, supplemental material, similar content within Connexions, and courses using the module.
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Creating Courses
If you want to guide students through a topic, you can arrange modules—whether they were authored by you or someone else--into a course. For instance, Beth Harris at the Fashion Institute of Technology, SUNY has built a course called “History of Western Art and Civilization” that is composed of modules written by Al van Helden for his Galileo web site and course. Connexions enables you to organize the modules into a sequence, add links to content inside and outside of Connexions, provide keywords, and author a description of your course.
To create a course, you need to work either in your personal workgroup or in a collaborative one. Connexions provides detailed tutorials on how to use work areas and the course composer tool for building courses, so I’ll mention only a few key features here. You can set up a collaborative work group and add other members of Connexions to it, allowing them to work with you in editing modules or building a course. From your work area, you can search Connexions for published modules to add to your course, or you can create new courses and modules. Using the course composer, you can create a course, organize it into sections, provide information about it, add and arrange modules, provide links, and, ultimately, publish it.
If you want to use a module in a course but also wish to make some changes to it, you have several options. On the most basic level, you can re-title the module and change its links. If you would like to make deeper changes, you can use the Suggest Edits function to ask the author to make revisions. Alternatively, you can copy an existing module, revise it, and publish it under your name using the Derived Copy function. Derived copies include an acknowledgement that they are based on another author’s module.
