"Do more with less." It's been the ask of higher education for the last 15 years (at least), and in the age of AI, that expectation has only grown. In 2017, my open-source authoring platform HAX (Headless Authoring Experience) employed four developers with formal responsibility for supporting online course development. By 2023, post-pandemic, we had one (me). Development of HAX should have slowed to a crawl, yet by 2024, we saw an explosion of output.
What changed? My teaching.
I stopped teaching my IST 256 students concepts parallel to our HAX ecosystem, and instead taught concepts that allowed them to move from learning about the web to contributing to HAX itself. I call this our Sustainable Impact and Innovation Pipeline (SIIP). This panel will primarily feature stories told by some of those involved in HAX Lab, from both the student and faculty perspectives. HAX Lab and the SIIP have produced dozens of web professionals who have made open-source contributions to HAX part of their career story. Beyond the “win-win” for HAX and the students who expand it, the SIIP simultaneously reduces the cost of online course development at Penn State, improves the user experience, and ensures the accessibility and security of the University.
This panel will explain what HAX is, what makes it unique, and how you can get involved. But we will emphasize the people in the SIIP who make HAX possible. We’ll feature the range of problems students have solved and ways faculty have contributed to growing the ecosystem. We hope you'll find that the methodology surrounding HAX is just as powerful as the technology itself! We would welcome a discussion regarding how transferable the SIIP approach might be to your institution.
Links:
- Learn about HAX Lab -- https://haxtheweb.org/hax-lab
- Article visualizing SIIP -- https://btopro.com/hax/sustainable-impact-and-innovation-pipeline
- Get involved with HAX -- https://github.com/haxtheweb/