Howdy, Pioneers!
This month, we happily moved out of Beta and launched Version 1.0 of the OpenLab. Please take a look around and see the changes. As you do, if you find you have questions, feel free to reach out to the Community Team via openlab@citytech.cuny.edu. We would love to hear about additional functionality you would still like to see, and would be happy to point out to you some of the new features of the OpenLab (now actually v1.0.1, soon to be v1.0.2, so you can see that we continue to improve the OpenLab!)
Many of you are planning to use the OpenLab again this semester, perhaps for the same course, perhaps for a different one. Please feel free to reach out to the team for support–it can be hard to remember how you did the things you did back in August! You might also want to consider how to use what you did last semester in building your site for this semester. A few considerations:
*should you continue using the same course and site, so that my new students benefit from working in conjunction with what the last group developed?
*should you use the same structure as last semester, minus the student content?
*should you use some of the structure, but modified to reflect this semester’s course or courses?
*should you start over and get some input about what to do differently?
Elizabeth, Bree, and Scott can certainly help with these scenarios. We want to emphasize, though, that for any of them, you do not need to delete content or courses, nor do you need to archive your Fall 2011 courses the way you might have in Blackboard. For the purposes of Title V Grant evaluation, and for the function of openness, we need you to leave that content as it stands now. Additionally, students may want to come back to it for their own portfolios, and prospective students might want to peruse courses to have a better sense of their future course choices. If you have any questions, please reach out to us–we’re happy to discuss this further.
Good luck with your Spring 2012 courses, and please share what’s working well that the rest of us should try!
Best,
Jody
