Crosslinks

Introduction and Educational Need
Crosslinks, funded by the a grant from the Alumni Class Funds, aims to provide students with tools to make connections between topics covered in different subjects at MIT.

Because MIT is a unified campus, all students take essentially the same basic math and science courses. But too often this fact is not exploited as it could be.

Crosslinks is designed to make explicit links between MIT subjects. Using the WIKI structure Crosslinks is a network of interelated linked concepts. The stable web presence afforded by MIT OpenCourseWare provides the endpoints of these links. Indeed, the Crosslinks WIKI enhances the usability of OCW on the MIT campus.

Structure and User Experience
Users create or add to concept pages in the Crosslinks WIKI. All concept pages have the same structure: a preamble consisting of a brief and informal definition of the concept and perhaps links to Wikipedia or to Wolfram MathWorld...

Followed by five sections:

• Prepare: What you need to now to understand this concept, and links taking you to where in the MIT curriculum you can learn it.
• Learn: Links to where this concept is taught at MIT.
• Relate: Links to material which is taught in parallel with the selected concept.
• Advance: Links to other Crosslinks pages which use or apply the concept.
• Apply: Links to MIT subject pages where the selected concept is used or applied.

History
The Crosslinks WIKI was developed mainly over the summer of 2011, by Chad Lieberman, Dani Hicks, Heidi Burgiel, Karen Willcox, and Haynes Miller. It was originally built on a SIPB server, but transfered to a faster OEIT server in the fall of 2011 by Peter Wilkins of OEIT.