The OpenLab grew up alongside the Living Lab General Education Seminar, and the success of both is thanks in part to a commitment to high-impact educational practices and open pedagogy.
The OpenLab team is collaborating today with the Living Lab General Education Seminar to get creative and think about ways of engaging students in the Intercultural Knowledge gen ed student learning outcome through open digital tools, using a game-based approach.
Interested in learning more? Check out our slides!
Did you ever show friends or colleagues City Tech’s OpenLab, only to have them ask, “How can I have an OpenLab at my school/institution/organization?!”
The answer is Commons in a Box OpenLab!
Please share information about the NYCDH Week workshop introducing CBOX OpenLab, tomorrow, 2/7, at the CUNY Graduate Center:
This workshop introduces Commons In A Box OpenLab: free, open source software that enables anyone to create a commons space specifically designed for open learning, where students, faculty, and staff can collaborate across disciplinary boundaries and share their work openly with one another and the world.
Funded by a generous grant from the NEH’s Office of Digital Humanities, the project brings together Commons In A Box (CBOX; http://commonsinabox.org/) — the software that powers NYCDH — and City Tech’s OpenLab platform for teaching, learning, and collaboration (https://openlab.citytech.cuny.edu/). The result is a teaching-focused version of CBOX that provides a powerful and flexible alternative to costly proprietary systems, and is already being adopted at CUNY and beyond.
We will begin by introducing CBOX OpenLab and demonstrating its features and functionality, using examples drawn from City Tech’s OpenLab and BMCC’s new installation. We will then engage participants in group discussion of how they might use (or are already using) CBOX OpenLab, and the benefits and challenges of open learning.
Some of City Tech’s OpenLab team is joining forces with some of the team growing BMCC’s OpenLab to showcase Commons in a Box OpenLab at the CUNY IT Conference today, 12/6, at 1pm: “Building Open Pedagogical Communities with Commons in a Box OpenLab.” We hope you can join us or check out our slides.
Last Thursday, November 7, we met for our second Open Pedagogy event of the semester. Our theme for the evening was Access Pedagogy. Against the backdrop of austerity and persistent budget crises at CUNY, we considered how we could make ourselves accessible as teachers. We asked:Â To what extent are our classrooms accessible, and what can we do to center access and equity in both in-person and online teaching?
We began the evening by exploring how our day-to-day experiences in the classroom and with students continually challenge our assumptions about teaching and learning. One participant shared that, as an instructor, they assumed that students would contact them or come to office hours if something weren’t clear. Other participants nodded and laughed in agreement as this same instructor then explained that this was 1) false; 2) untrue of even their own behavior as a student. Many of us admitted that, when we were in college, we were often too shy, intimidated, or busy to go to our professors’ office hours ourselves. The implication? It’s actually our job as instructors to make sure we are being clear and to check-in regularly with our students!
More generally, our students continually and productively challenge our assumptions. At CUNY, many of our students balance careers, caretaking, and college. In many ways, they are expected to be superhuman. As instructors, we learn again and again that our most engaged and creative students may be frequently absent or late for class. We learn again and again that access to basic technology—including a computer and safe and stable internet connection—is not a given. Nor can we take for granted that our students will have had the time and resources to complete all of their coursework. This entails a need for some malleability and ingenuity on our part.
Fortunately, we can work to reduce barriers to student learning; we can work to improve access. At the event, we discussed softening the language in our syllabi, such that policies around punctuality, attendance, and late work submission are made somewhat flexible and always compassionate. We can provide students with laptops and other forms of accessible technology, including by using open and free software and open platforms (like the OpenLab!). We can help our students seek out resources and list these on our OpenLab course/project sites. Moreover, we can do all this while still teaching students the importance of advocating for themselves, and of making their own needs clear to their instructors.
Of course, not all of the problems we face in higher learning today have straightforward solutions. Despite our enthusiasm for open learning platforms like the OpenLab and, especially for Open Educational Resources (OERs), a participant reminded us that we must be careful to not simply replicate the textbook format. Working digitally gives students an opportunity to express themselves not just in formal essays, but in memes, gifs, and blogs. We should not shy away from multimedia, nor from opportunities to make students co-creators of a course. Moreover, while we can all strive to make ourselves more accessible as instructors, we also have to confront the harsh realities of the trauma, racism, and poverty many of our students face, as well as the high workloads and precarity many of our adjunct instructors live with.
Let’s continue the conversation! Please comment on this post with thoughts/ questions.
Curious about the OpenLab team behind our 24/7 e-mail support, office hours, and workshops? Right now we’re featuring OpenLab Digital Pedagogy Fellows who do these on-the-ground projects as part of our ongoing Retrospective series. Many thanks to past team members who’ve helped the OpenLab thrive, and to current members who keep everything running smoothly!
What is your role on the OpenLab team?
Portrait by Michaela Oteri
Since 2018, I’ve been with the team as a Digital Pedagogy Fellow. I do Pedagogy Profiles, organize and facilitate workshops, and work with the Community Team to devise new programming, features for the site, and other ways to reach out to and support the City Tech community! You can usually tell it’s me writing because I use a lot of exclamation points!
Describe your experience using the OpenLab to support your pedagogy.
Since I don’t teach courses here at City Tech, I don’t get to use the OpenLab for my classroom teaching (fingers crossed that will change in the future!), but I’m responsible for a lot of the workshop and event content we offer during the academic year. This means that I’m constantly flipping through new sites for Pedagogy Profile candidates and examples for workshops, and through back-end work like testing plugins, I get to experiment with brand-new functionality and features.
This means that even though some of our workshop topics may sound familiar to long-time users of the OpenLab, we do try our best to provide updated examples of tools we like, assignment ideas, and best practices for using the OpenLab to teach, learn, and connect.
Can you describe the ways you have integrated the OpenLab into your pedagogical practices here at City Tech or elsewhere?
I’m in my third year working on my Ph.D. in English Composition and Rhetoric at the CUNY Graduate Center, and my pedagogy shows up in my academic and poetic writing. I have actually been able to bring a lot of my silly teaching metaphors and informal pedagogy into workshops that I co-facilitate with other OpenLab Fellows! I make a lot of bad jokes about computers, try to include some interactivity into lecture-heavy workshop agendas, and ask attendees to collaborate and share knowledge, much as I do in my writing classrooms.
Spending time on the OpenLab as a non-teaching community member means I get to build on other folks’ work in my own teaching on the CUNY Academic Commons: using categories to organize student writing on my course sites, setting up my class schedule with Mammoth .docx, or even getting overexcited and activating a bunch of features that I don’t know how to use well can provide a useful space for my students and me to share our difficulties all underscore my pedagogical values: appreciating failure, embracing human error with humor, and staying flexible.
How have the OpenLab and other open digital pedagogy tools transformed or expanded your pedagogy, and the pedagogical values you’re able to realize in your courses and educational practice?Â
I’ve actually written about this a bit over at the Graduate Center Teaching and Learning Center blog Visible Pedagogy and on my personal site where I showcase some of my digital projects.
Meme by @hot.crip
As we use more and more digital tools in my classrooms, we are inevitably going to face network errors, broken links, and ugly formatting. Through coping with my chronic illnesses, I’ve learned to feel confident sharing my own needs, including technological ones. Remaining a motivated and curious learner is a huge part of why I love working with students especially, as they have so much to teach.
One of my favorite OpenLab things is our Open Pedagogy series where staff and faculty come together over snacks to chat informally about a specific topic in teaching and learning, and I’ve found that the ethos of these spaces is comfortable and generative for me as a learner, and I feel confident sharing even things I’ve found difficult in balancing my positionalities as PhD student, fellow, adjunct, and scholar. Inevitably, other folks can relate to some of what I share, while others provide an alternate framing for the topic that helps me reimagine a way to engage with a challenging experience.
Aside from courses, how does the OpenLab support your pedagogical practices and ambitions? (Note: Think broadly about public education initiatives, course coordination, non-academic student support, clubs, and projects, etc.)
Well, I’ve gotten really good at responding to workshop participants’ in-the-moment needs, which builds on my previous career as a waitress. The informal setting of our twice-per-semester Open Pedagogy events is both enriching and comfortable for my style of learning, and I was able to center one of my primary research interests (accessibility) as our OP theme for this year!
I’m also hoping to use Portfolios to showcase some of my CUNY-specific digital and writing projects, though my own exam deadlines inevitably bump this project down!
Curious about the OpenLab team behind our 24/7 e-mail support, office hours, and workshops? Right now we’re featuring OpenLab Digital Pedagogy Fellows who do these on-the-ground projects as part of our ongoing Retrospective series. Many thanks to past team members who’ve helped the OpenLab thrive, and to current members who keep everything running smoothly!
What is your role on the OpenLab team?
I’m a digital pedagogy fellow/community team member!
Describe your experience using the OpenLab to support your pedagogy.
Before working for the OpenLab, I had only taught using Blackboard. I love the flexibility of getting to design my own course site and getting to look at what other instructors are doing to get ideas for my own classes. Because I teach rhetoric, I can also use the website itself as a teaching moment to explain my own design choices as a web composer.
Can you describe the ways you have integrated the OpenLab into your pedagogical practices here at City Tech or elsewhere?
I teach at John Jay, so I use the CUNY Academic Commons instead of the OpenLab, but the concept/structure and most of the features are the same. Working with OpenLab users through my position on the community team has helped me learn a lot about how to use the Commons myself. I’m having my students write comments on blog posts on our course site instead of participating in a discussion forum, and they will be doing two mini-projects this semester where they write their own posts for each other to read and comment on. They’re also going to be making digital portfolios for our class. I’m still providing a word doc version of the syllabus, but I’ve also made it web-friendly on our site with a very clickable table of contents, which hopefully makes navigation easier.
How have the OpenLab and other open digital pedagogy tools transformed or expanded your pedagogy, and the pedagogical values you’re able to realize in your courses and educational practice?Â
As a teacher, I’m nervous about student work (and my own teaching materials) being out in the open, partially because I worry the students will be anxious about it. I believe in the philosophy of openness and the pedagogical value of giving students a real platform and audience besides writing the weird genre of the “college essay” just to send it to me, but the OpenLab showed me how beautiful and useful it can be in practice. So many teachers are already doing exactly the things I was nervous about implementing, and it’s great! In a sentence, the OpenLab has given me inspiration and confidence to take pedagogical risks.
Aside from courses, how does the OpenLab support your pedagogical practices and ambitions? (Note: Think broadly about public education initiatives, course coordination, non-academic student support, clubs, and projects, etc.)
I can look at my colleagues’ work and share mine with them, learn about WordPress features that I can use for myself or teach to my students, and engage in pedagogical discussions with a much broader range of people. I can see it also being useful to look at the kinds of things students are doing outside of my class so I can make more informed connections with the other parts of their lives.
Thursday, November 7, 2019, 4:30-6:00pm (Faculty Commons, N227)
*Refreshments will be served. (Thanks to the Faculty Commons for its generous support of this event!)
*Part-time faculty are eligible to receive a stipend for participation.
*Please RSVP by commenting on this post. Please share this invitation with your colleagues!
Despite CUNY’s historical role as an opportunity-granting institution, austerity—that is, rising tuition and numbers of contingent faculty, failing infrastructure, etc.—impacts teaching and learning conditions across the university. As we’re facing budget crises, overburdened adjuncts, and students balancing careers, caretaking, and college, how can we make ourselves accessible as teachers? What does an accessible syllabus look like? To what extent are our classrooms accessible, and what can we do to center access and equity in both in-person and online teaching? Join the OpenLab Team, City Tech faculty and staff, and CUNY colleagues at our next Open Pedagogy event, where we will discuss how we can increase access in our pedagogical practices in and out of the classroom, on and offline.
What changes have you made to your teaching documents and practices to center access and equity, specifically thinking about office hours, handling lateness, absences, requests for extensions or make-up exams, with access in mind?
Many Black, brown, first-generation, and other marginalized students bring experiences of educational trauma to college classrooms. What can we as instructors and advocates do to combat the normalizing, hegemonic goals of gatekeeping institutional spaces like the classroom? What resources do you make students aware of for when they need support?
What role can open digital pedagogy play in increasing access to education? What pitfalls must we avoid to ensure access?
How have you as staff and faculty members worked to care for both your students and yourself in spite of austerity? Are there supports on campus that you have found useful? How about support elsewhere?Â
On Thursday, September 19, faculty and staff from City Tech, CUNY, and other New York City universities (e.g. Pratt University) got together for the first of two Open Pedagogy events the OpenLab is hosting this semester. Participants discussed “Access Beyond the ADA”
Note that the discussion was framed around access rather than accessibility. As we noted in our post announcing the event, the term accessibility conveys the degree to which a space, process, or concept is accessible. By contrast, access denotes the process by which accessibility is achieved. Our focus on Thursday evening was on broadening our understanding of “access” beyond compliance with the ADA. We considered the following questions:
How can open digital pedagogy impact, augment, and enhance access?
What are the limits of technology’s impact on access and accessibility?
What barriers to access have you encountered as faculty and staff? What about the barriers you’ve experienced students facing?Â
What resources have helped you to improve access in your academic courses and projects?
Participants kicked off the evening by recounting how some of their own assumptions around access had been called into question. For example, a participant shared that once they included language in their syllabi inviting students to talk about their different learning styles, they experienced a drastic shift in their relationship with students. This faculty member noted that students had opened up to them in unexpected ways; most simply wanted to talk about how they learned and how they studied. Some were looking for advice, validation, and acknowledgement. Few were looking for technical “accommodation.” None, the faculty member emphasized, were looking for what some disparagingly call “preferential treatment.” Most students simply wanted to be heard—to have their differences recognized. This anecdote helped ground the evening in a principle that might be captured by a simple maxim: trust your students. Students are often quite aware of their needs and can tell you how to improve access to learning in your class. But they need to be given the space to do so.
Several participants echoed these experiences, including alluding to experiences of attempting to accommodate student needs and facing institutional guidelines that restrict faculty agency to grade, grant extensions, or even appropriately refer students to other offices on campus that may provide support. Even the simple awareness of which offices serve which purposes can be obfuscated to first-generation students and part-time, temporary, or contract faculty and staff, so it can be difficult to advise students on the best course of action without a thorough orientation, a luxury that seems to have diminished under austere working conditions in higher ed.Â
Similarly, disabled teaching and non-teaching faculty in the room recounted having to stay in the disability “closet” for much of their careers. Rare are those occasions on which university instructors are invited to share the accommodations they might require. Some noted that the use of open digital pedagogy—and platforms like the OpenLab—had made their lives much easier. The ability to create interactive and accessible web content, and to teach meaningfully through this content has been invaluable, especially for instructors with chronic illness, autism, and other disabilities that impact their ability to stand, communicate verbally or nonverbally, and other traditional pedagogical expectations in a classroom.
But significant barriers remain. The physical environment is a major obstacle to access: many participants remarked on the difficulty of getting around the CUNY campuses when disabled, remarking on simple architectural inaccessibility in the forms of steps and stairs and nonfunctional elevators, and other issues such as overcrowded hallways that can be difficult to navigate during class changes. Another barrier is that the websites students and faculty depend on—including the database search for the library—are not always easily read with a screen reader. Finally, while technology is arguable a prerequisite for improving access to learning, it can also be an auditory and visual distraction for students in the classroom. Participants noted that they sometimes struggle with what to ask their students to do with cell phones: should these be allowed on desks in class? For one math instructor, a smartphone can supplant the need for an expensive calculator as well as acting as a common means of accessing online material. But what about when they become a distraction and possibly undermine a student’s success in a course?
Finally, participants emphasized at multiple points that improvements to access must come from people—not technology. On its own, technology cannot transform a student’s learning or an instructor’s teaching or service to the university. But it can be employed with the intention of making learning affordable, accessible, and varied; it can be used to adapt teaching to different learning styles. The key word here is intention. To focus on access, participants noted, is to value the ongoing human energy that is required to meet people’s accessibility rights and, conversely, the energy people must put in to have their own rights met . The processes at play are not automatic. They have to be enacted. Our conversation last Thursday evening was one way to redouble our commitment to this enactment.
Let’s continue the conversation! Please comment on this post with thoughts/ questions. And don’t forget to join us for our next Open Pedagogy event, on November 7!
I am an OpenLab Co-Director and part of the OpenLab Community Team. This is my first year as a part of the OpenLab leadership, but I have been using OpenLab for the past five years and continue to use it in my current ENG2575, Technical Writing class.
Prof. Ellis’s Technical Writing course homepage
Describe your experience using the OpenLab to support your pedagogy.
Before joining the City Tech faculty, I used WordPress and various social media platforms with my students at Georgia Tech. When I heard about the OpenLab at City Tech during my transition, I jumped at the chance to try out this homegrown platform that combined WordPress with social media elements via Buddypress.Â
OpenLab enables me to help students learn more about openness, collaboration, public-facing audiences, multimodal composition, and by doing rather than simply showing. I have taught classes from ENG1101, English Composition I to ENG2420, Science Fiction to ENG3760, Digital Storytelling with the OpenLab.
And, I like sharing a quote with my students from the science fiction writer William Gibson: “the street finds its own use for things.” This is true for OpenLab. I make use of it to meet the goals set for my classes and those that I want to offer my students. Likewise, I encourage my students to learn how to use OpenLab as they would any other digital tool and imagine how they can use it for their purposes and leverage it to meet the goals that they set for themselves.
courtesy of Prof. Ellis
Can you describe the ways you have integrated the OpenLab into your pedagogical practices here at City Tech or elsewhere?
I want to make information easily accessible to my students in the places where they are (on smartphones and computers), I want my students to realize that the writing that they do has more audiences than their instructors and includes many possible audiences online, I want my students to read and engage the writing of their peers, and I want to offer students open educational resources (OER) or zero textbook cost (ZTC). OpenLab supports all these pedagogical initiatives.
For students’ needs as they transition to the workplace or graduate school, I encourage students to think about how the writing that they do on OpenLab creates a record of their intellectual development and how the projects that they post serve as proof that they have needed communication skills. Students can curate their work into a Portfolio that they can link to from their LinkedIn.com profile, personal domain, or resume.
I share my reasoning with students behind the things that I do and the things that I ask them to do with or on the OpenLab. It’s important that they understand why OpenLab is an invaluable, homegrown resource that improves their access and interaction in the classroom while preparing them for job seeking and the workplace.
How have the OpenLab and other open digital pedagogy tools transformed or expanded your pedagogy, and the pedagogical values you’re able to realize in your courses and educational practice?Â
OpenLab makes it very easy for me to work with students in the classroom and asynchronously between class meetings. I keep my past classes on the OpenLab, because students have reported back to me that they refer to them to remember something relevant to their other classes or work. And, I tell students that they are free to browse my other classes on OpenLab, because they might learn something from them or consider taking one of my other classes based on what they discover.Â
Aside from courses, how does the OpenLab support your pedagogical practices and ambitions?Â
In addition to teaching with the OpenLab, I use it for collaboration and outreach. I started the project site Science Fiction at City Techabout four years ago to promote the City Tech Science Fiction Collection, advertise our annual science fiction symposium, and share teaching materials. Also, and perhaps more importantly, the project site has grown to promote student involvement in the City Tech Science Fiction Collection, such as through helping build the finding aid and class visits, and it is a central resource for sharing video of past symposium presentations.Â
Snapshot of Samuel R. Delany visiting City Tech’s Science Fiction Collection
I created the Retrocomputing at City Tech project site to catalog the vintage computer resources that I keep in my office and regularly use in my classes. My intent was to highlight these artifacts that are available—some I own, and some CUNY owns—for use in classes. While I’m still working to make this project site as successful as the Science Fiction at City Tech site, the fact that I could get it up and running quickly with OpenLab, I consider a win.
