Align on [latexpage]!

Hi everyone! Back when I was beginning to work on the MAT 1575 course hub (after most of you had already finished your course hubs!) I asked about whether we could line up equal signs on latexpages on the OpenLab.

At the time it seemed like the answer was no, but I just determined that IT IS VERY ANNOYING BUT YES WE CAN!!!

Continue reading “Align on [latexpage]!”

Meeting Agenda and Notes 8/20/20

  • Halloooo!
  • Status updates – how are we doing?
    • MAT 1275 Course Hub– Ariane
    • – ready (all pages need to be polished, but good to go).
    • MAT 1275CO Course Hub – Ariane
    • – should be ready by tomorrow (2 lessons to go)!!
    • – Table of Contents – they fixed one of the problems (possible to minimize – but not minimized as default)
    • – giving credits: Thomas & Holly, Henry, (Desmos).
    • – sidebar menu adventures
    • TO DO (EVERYONE): On About page, add a note that the Course Hub was developed in Summer 2020 by XXX (your name here), any other credits that are appropriate.
    • MAT 1372 Course Hub – Marianna
    • MAT 1375 Course Hub – Jonas
    • – I’m behind! But working on it now – hopefully complete in next couple days
    • – videos: Could Ariana apply for OER fellowship (Aug 17 deadline)? (Applications are available now). Kate: involvement in Course Hub initiative? Generally people like the idea of using the videos and compensating her if possible.
    • MAT 1475 Course Hub – Lin
    • – all done! (Awesome!). Except: Answers for exit problems? Kate is not planning to!
    • – waiting for Jonas to give link to model course (See MIR page)
    • MAT 1575 Course Hub – Kate
    • – through lesson 20 (End of Taylor series)!
    • – turning to personal course for now – will return to it once semester starts (end of September latest).
    • – need to add learning outcomes, TOC
    • MAT 2680 Course Hub – Satish
    • – content is collected for all lectures
    • – fine-tuning one lecture, then will clone & put up others
    • – added “Lesson 0:” Why do we need to do differential equations?? (Great video)
    • – by end of weekend should have 15 lessons up.
    • – learning outcomes – will be simple, one line
    • Feedback on design – colors & graphic
    • – LaTeX fun (lining up multiple lines of equations)
    • – great 🙂 !
  • Promoting Course Hubs (& Model Courses)
    • Initial email from Sandie re: Resources & Workshops
    • – maybe an email to MIR site, explaining Course Hubs & Model Courses (?)
    • Math Dept OpenLab site
    • Math Instructors Resource site
    • – update list in 8/14 workshop post on Math Instructor Resource page
    • where else?
      • Atrium Learning Center website: https://www.citytech.cuny.edu/alc/math.aspx
      • – let’s ask Kate! She can reach out to Judy about adding Course Hubs (also may be some additional WW links, video resources etc to add)
      • – Mariya bessonov? (sabbatical)
      • Math Dept website
      • – JONAS: Did someone take over for Mariya? Go through website committee (Peter Dinh is contact in CIS)
      • JONAS: Sandie is meeting with Adjuncts (next week?) – can she talk about Course Hubs/Model Courses?
      • JONAS: Ask Course Coordinators To send link with resources?
  • Credit to Course Hub team for lesson development?
  • Model Courses
  • Request: Please look at the Model Course for your Course Hub
    • Any links need to be updated?
    • Any additional resources that would be appropriate to include?
  • WW discussion:
  • – timeline for setting up current semester courses?
  • – do we have WW sets for 2680? (Satish: Yes, problems are fine w/ small exceptions (Bernoulli, representing constants)).
  • TO DO (EVERYONE):
    • On About page, add a note that the Course Hub was developed in Summer 2020 by XXX (your name here), any other credits that are appropriate. JONAS TOO!
    • JONAS: In the Faculty area, provide link for feedback. – follow up with group.

Accessibility cheat sheets

Hi everyone! I found some interesting cheat sheets for designing accessible websites. The information in the images below would have been useful to have a few weeks ago before everyone had already made up their lessons, but better late than never??? If we continue to update and maintain the course hubs, we can keep these tips in mind. I like that they go beyond the bare minimum of having a site be “accessible” according to some narrow or bureaucratic definition and instead offer tips for making sites actually *accessible* to different types of users. (A bit ironic: I doubt posting text in jpgs like this passes any accessibility tests…)

Continue reading “Accessibility cheat sheets”

Updates to ALL Course Hub sites

Hi everyone,

While you’ve been building lessons, I’ve been working on updating all the other pages & resources on Course Hub sites. The final versions are all available on the MAT 1375 Course Hub. It’s time to copy all of those changes to each of the other Course Hub. I’m asking each of you to go through the list below and make the indicated updates. Of course, there may be some places where you’ve already included some resources – in that case, take a look at the resources that I provided and see if you can merge them together. There are also a few organizational changes (menu items and so on) which I’ll ask you to make. Please respond with a comment if you run into trouble!

Thank you to everyone for your enormous efforts over the past few weeks. It’s great to see these coming together!

Best,

Jonas

Updates to all Course Hubs

Updating pages: For the most part, this consists of copy/pasting the page from the MAT 1375 Course Hub to the page on your own Course Hub.

TIPS FOR EASY COPY/PASTING:

  • I have made all of you mods on the MAT 1375 Course Hub, so you should be able to edit pages & copy their contents.
  • In the block editor, you can easily copy the entire page contents by clicking the three vertical dots in the top right corner of the screen and selecting “Copy all content”

TIPS FOR UPDATING LINKS:

  • If you need to update a link on a page, edit the page and click on the link – an Edit button should pop up.
  • You can easily find links to pages on your own site without copy/pasting them – just delete the link in the popup box (after clicking Edit), and then start typing the title of the page you want (for example, type “Resources”). You can then select the appropriate page from the list that appears.
  • Don’t forget to click the “elbow arrow” button to save your edits.

Pages to update:

  1. About page
    • Copy/paste content, update all links to point to appropriate pages on *your own* course hub (don’t worry about links pointing to other sites – leave them as-is)
  2. Resources page
    • Copy/paste content, update all links to point to appropriate pages on *your own* course hub
  3. Resources/Textbooks
    • Update textbook information for your course – (no need to copy/paste if you’ve already done this)
  4. Resources/WeBWorK
    • Copy/paste content
  5. Resources/VideoResources
  6. Resources/Tutoring
    • Copy/paste this page
  7. Resources/Review
    • Copy/paste this page, update all links (& text if necessary – not every course has video solutions to select final exam questions, for example)
    • Guest Access WeBWorK sections are all listed here — scroll down to “G” for the Guest Access listings
  8. For Faculty (no updates necessary)
  9. For Faculty/Announcements
    • Copy/paste the “Faculty Announcements” post (it’s a post, not a page – the Edit button should be just under the post title), or create your own welcome message for faculty.
  10. For Faculty/Course Coordination
    • Copy/paste this page.  OR update it with appropriate resources for your course, if you have them
  11. For Faculty/WeBWorK Faculty Resources
    • Copy/paste this page.
  12. For Faculty/Training and Support (ENG FYW Course Hub has some links on this stuff – https://openlab.citytech.cuny.edu/fyw-pedagogy/)
    • Copy/paste this page.

Additional Course Hub changes

  1. Change “Syllabus” to “Course Outline”
    • Click “Syllabus”, click “Edit” (edit pencil) to edit the page
    • Change page title to “Course Outline”, change link text to “departmental course outline”
    • Update (save) (the menu should update automatically to match the page title)
  2. Update the sidebar menu for the Lessons pages
    • Step 1: add all Lessons to the sidebar menu:
      • Dashboard/Appearance/Menus:
      • Menu to edit: lessons_sidebar
      • Drag all lessons into menu structure (in order)
      • Save
    • Step 2: assign this menu to appears in the sidebar of all Lessons pages:
      • Dashboard/Appearance/Theme Sidebars:
      • Sidebar to edit: Lessons
      • drag all Lesson pages under “Sidebar Replacement Pages” (order doesn’t matter)
      • Save
  3. Lessons menu – remove dropdown from main menu, put links to all lessons on the Lessons page:
    • To remove the dropdown menu item(s):
      • Dashboard/Appearance/Menus
      • Menu to edit: top
      • Delete anything that is indented below “Lessons” (e.g. “Lesson 20”).  NOTE: To delete, click the down-arrow and select “Remove”.
      • Save
    • To put lesson links on page
      • Click “Lessons”, click “Edit” (edit pencil) to edit page
      • Add list of lessons, link each one to the appropriate page
      • Save (Update)
  4. Update the site Header and Avatar using the provided resources for each course:
    • Site Header Graphics for each course will be posted here in the next few hours (I’m working on them!). I chose a “hub-like” graphic with custom background color for each site (aligning with the color schemes already in use in the Video Resource Sites) – not sure if it’s perfect it will have to do for now, happy to make changes to this later!
    • Start by downloading (right-click and “Save As”) your Header file to your hard drive. Use the same file for both Header and Avatar (you will need to upload it twice, once for the Header and Avatar – see instructions below).
    • HEADER FILES (background colors are listed for information only):
    • 1. Update Site Header:
      • Go to Dashboard/Appearance/Header
      • “Add New Image” – this takes you to the Media Library
      • Click the “Upload Files” tab
      • Select or drag-and-drop the Header Image from your hard drive
      • Once the file appears in your Media Library, hit “Select and Crop”
      • Crop the image however you like – it’s ok if they are all a little different
      • Click “Publish” at the top of the page to save the changes
      • (NOTE: If you don’t like the way it comes out and you want to try cropping it again differently, just go back to Header, click “Add New Image”, and select the image from your Media Library and hit “Select and Crop” again.
    • 2. Update Avatar:
      • Click “Edit Profile”
      • Click “Change Avatar”underneath the picture
      • “Choose file” and select the Header Image from your hard drive
      • Crop it however you like – it’s ok if they are a little different

Meeting Agenda and Notes 8/6/20

  • Halloooo! And welcome Kate, course coordinators, and Sandie!
  • Review of project
    • What is a Course Hub?
      • departmental resources for students and faculty
      • team is building Online Lessons
      • Jonas is building other resources
      • static (not meant for interaction/discussion)
      • brief tour of course hub
      • Volunteers to show a sample lesson?
    • Course Hub vs Model Course
      • every section needs an online home! Blackboard or OpenLab.
      • if you’re using OpenLab, Model Course is place you start (clone it for your own section)
      • course hub lives on OL but resources are for use by everyone, whether they choose blackboard or openlab
  • Feedback:
    • Thomas: would be *great* to have internal City Tech videos for all of these!
    • Kate: there is an existing (possibly unused) faculty resource site for Math – maybe we can adopt this?
    • Ezra: let’s try to finalize lessons 1 month before they appear on syllabus?
  • Update on faculty training
    • Initial “What is an online course” training Wed 8/12 and Wed 8/19.
    • Focussed technical trainings on Ths Fri both weeks.
    • Model Course trainings tbd within those two Ths/Fri windowsill (tentatively Fri mornings)
    • Kate will help out with the Model Course trainings (thanks Kate!)
    • Jonas: MathType – good OCR for math equations
    • Ezra: class slides w/ content from publisher – put these on private instructor area
  • Course Hubs – status updates
    • Lesson development:
    • Other resource development – any input from course coordinators on resources to include (especially faculty resources specific to your course)?
      • Resources
        • Textbook
        • WeBWorK
        • Video Resources
        • Tutoring
        • Review
      • For Faculty
        • Kate: link to stem applications from OG.
        • Project Prompts for faculty (and solutions/examples)
        • Faculty Announcements
        • Course Coordination
        • WeBWorK Faculty Resources
        • Training and Support
  • Accessibility:
  • Questions:
    • Marianna: question about cover image (converted to HTML???) – Jonas will look into
    • Kate: Numbering lessons – consecutive? Or skip a number for exams?. Consecutive
    • Kate: Learning outcomes for individual lessons? (OpenStax has them listed – will pull from there)
    • Kate: (1575 reduction fmlas for trig integrals – some faculty use them, some don’t – included paragraph “these exist, talk to your instructor about whether you are using them”)
    • Kate: embed desmos graph? JONAS will follow up OpenLab team.
    • Ariane: screenshots from Desmos OK? JONAS will look into it (think its ok – does it need attribution?)
    • Kate: Colors in LaTeX? (I think this is not supported)
    • Ariane: is there another plugin for LaTeX that allows us to use more functionality? JONAS bug OL team about this.
    • Block editor: the gosh-dang popup bar covers up what I want to look at!
    • Kate: Accordions – Pages with accordions have extra accordions generated when you click edit?? BUG! JONAS will report.
  • Kate: Interested in Mastery grading – “standards based grading”. Make a list of standards for the course (specific learning outcomes). Assessments – whether that standard has been mastered or not. Interviews?