Best Practices

Now that you’ve created a course and are working on your site, it’s important to consider some basic best practices for the organization and sharing of information and educational materials.

Privacy

First, if you’re planning to ask your students to post on the course site, it’s important to think through some privacy implications of students sharing work online.

In order to comply with the Federal Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), never require your students to identify themselves by their real names or post any identifying information. They can do so if they choose, but requiring them to is not a good practice. You’ll be able to identify them in the Dashboard by their City Tech email addresses, so don’t worry about not knowing who is who on the front end of your site.  

Also, privacy settings are easy to modify at granular levels on the OpenLab. Learn more about that in this helpful section on privacy in Help section.

Accessibility

It’s important that when you build your site that you keep its accessibility to everyone in mind. If we build sites that those with a variety of disabilities can use, we can try to ensure that the “Open” in OpenLab can be honored for everyone. In practice, this means doing relatively simple things including the following:

Choose a theme that is both responsive (meaning that it works well on a mobile device) and passes some accessibility tests. Use any of the WordPress themes on the OpenLab that start with “Twenty,” as these have already done most of the work for you. You can also use headers instead of bolding to denote sections of text, including alt text tags in images that you upload, and sticking to the basic fonts already available are also simple ways to make sure that your site is accessible.  You can consult this article in Help to learn more about what you can do to make sure your site is equally open to all.

Copyright

The OpenLab is licensed with a Creative Commons (CC) license of noncommercial, attribution, share and share alike. Anything you produce on the OpenLab has this same license by default. This affords you automatic copyright protection, and is open for people to reuse it as long as it is attributed to you for any noncommercial use  and shared with that same license. You can modify this license if you like, but this is the default. However, if you plan on sharing materials that are not your own on the OpenLab, you should investigate the copyright restrictions on those materials. Consult this roundup of resources around copyright and open digital pedagogy while you build your site and don’t hesitate to contact the OpenLab team or the City Tech Library if you have any additional concerns.

File Sharing

As you upload media to your site, keep in mind that each OpenLab site has a file storage limit of 300mb. When you want to share images, make sure that those images have been resized and optimized for the web. Learn more about to how to do that in this post about sharing large files, which covers all of that and more.If you intend to use your site to share large files, consider housing things like video and audio on exterior sites like YouTube and SoundCloud. Once they’ve been uploaded there, they can be easily and seamlessly embedded into pages and posts on the OpenLab.

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