UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — As the need for website content creation has become commonplace in modern learning spaces and workplaces, a team in the College of Arts and Architecture’s Office of Digital Learning (ODL) has developed a platform to help creators of all experience levels reach their goals.
HAX, or Headless Authoring eXperience, is a content management system (CMS) that structures content in a ubiquitous format for simple web publishing. In short, it is an open-source, easy and user-friendly way to create, share, edit and remix content.
The ODL team, led by Bill Rose and Bryan Ollendyke, celebrated in August the first private-sector application of HAX when Invent Penn State used the platform to develop Customer Discovery 101, a new entrepreneurship training program available to the public.
“This is a major adoption of HAX and one that we believe makes a compelling argument for the strength of the platform,” Rose said. “In our office, we don’t want to be constrained by off-the-shelf tools that dictate how we work. The creation of HAX provides an open-source platform for all content creators to also lose those constraints.”
Invent Penn State’s adoption of the platform is a moment for the team that reinforces the potential of HAX, but it is far from the first.
ODL uses HAX each year to support more than 12,000 World Campus and University Park students in 47 online courses (more than 250 course sections) instructed by 100 faculty members and graduate students. The Eberly College of Science relies on HAX to serve their online students and in 2022, the University Libraries used the platform for the project titled “The Sea Voyage.”
Before these success stories, the ODL team searched for and tested ways to create and implement a platform like HAX for about a decade. A breakthrough came in the spring of 2020 when Ollendyke, who teaches courses in the College of Information Sciences and Technology, had a student in Mumbai, India, call him with a game-changing revelation.
“He jumped on a call at 4 a.m. his time to tell me that I was the only faculty member whose online courses he could access,” Ollendyke said.
At the time, the COVID-19 pandemic was exploding around the globe and students had shifted to online learning. Mainstream platforms like Canvas were overrun with traffic and without a stable, high-speed internet connection, courses could take hours to load, if at all.
Luckily for his students, Ollendyke was testing an early version of HAX and the course was delivered through the platform. The result was uninterrupted access to education during a high-stress time.
“I thought, ‘that’s interesting because we didn’t build it for that reason,’” Ollendyke said. “The fact that a student halfway across the world could still access this course changed everything.”
According to Ollendyke, to understand why it worked, wrapping your, well, head around what “headless” means in website development is the first step.
In traditional website architecture, a site requires both a “front end” and a “back end” to function. The front end is what the user sees and interacts with. The back end supplies everything else needed to make the site work — the server, application, databases and digital asset management. The front end and back end are in constant communication as a content author or end user interacts with a site.
A headless website separates the front end from the back end, which means the entire site is a single folder that can be zipped and sent to anyone. Content creators and editors can then simply open, edit, share and remix in a way not possible with traditional site architecture.
A natural byproduct of a headless website is speed. This is because most assets are initially downloaded to the user’s computer, which means those assets are immediately available for all subsequent page loads. For Ollendyke’s student in India, this is why the course on the HAX platform loaded when all the others wouldn’t.
“We were in crisis mode, and it survived, which told us that this could work,” Ollendyke said.
Since that breakthrough, Ollendyke has started the HAX Lab, an arrangement where some of his most promising IST 256 students extend HAX under his direction. This is a win-win, Ollendyke explained, as students gain highly valuable experience in building web component technology used in a real platform, and HAX becomes an ever more powerful solution.
The improvement and innovation ultimately caught the eye of Invent Penn State.
Annie Hughes, statewide coordinator of Invent Penn State, said not only was the system easy to use, but the HAX team provided exceptional support as their website was constructed.
HAX made building a multi-media training program simple and the design templates significantly reduced the time and skill required to design the interface, Hughes explained.
“Now launched, our program has received overwhelmingly positive reviews from our users for both functionality and design,” Hughes said. “We plan to continue working with HAX for development of our future programs.”
With several success stories in the books, the team is pursuing funding from various sources, including through the National Science Foundation’s program titled POSE, Pathways to Enable Open-Source Ecosystems. Funding would help the team to continue work on the platform while developing a robust user network.
“We’re building towards a truly self-sustaining ecosystem where others can come and readily join to extend the open-source platform we are offering,” Rose said. “This was an idea on a napkin 10 years ago, but we feel like we’re just getting started.”
Visit the HAX website for more information or contact Bill Rose at bmr1@psu.edu.