On September 15, 2021 we released version 1.7.54 of the OpenLab. It was a small release that included a few bug fixes and some minor plugin updates.
We fixed a bug causing acknowledgements to appear on portfolio profiles, when they should only appear for Courses, Projects, and Clubs. We also updated the acknowledgements widget that is added to cloned sites. The widget will now include changes we made to the format of acknowledgments on group profiles, added in the August release. It will show any additional group creators added, as well as any additional text. In a future release, we’ll make the widget available on sites for non-cloned groups that include acknowledgments.
A group picture of faculty and staff serving on the Hispanic Serving Institution Committee.
This week, we celebrate Hispanic heritage month by spotlighting the Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI) Committee’s new site! The site is clean and well-organized and can serve as a model for other academic committees. From left to right, its menu features: a static home page which describes the committee’s goals; a page that answers the question What is an HSI?; a page About the Committee; and a page with additional Resources. Note how intuitive this set-up is: it briefly gives the information needed to understand the committee’s purpose before offering in-depth descriptions of the context in which the committee is working, the faculty and staff serving on the team, and additional readings and support opportunities for those who are interested. Note also that the header image features a group picture of the faculty and staff serving on the committee: this is a lovely personal touch!
We’d also like to draw your attention to the events page, as there many coming up for HSI Week 2021. Today, September 13, there will be two HSI forums: one for faculty, staff and administrators and the other for students and families. You can sign up for these forums here.
Finally, we want to highlight the committee’s recommendations for City Tech, which include doubling the number of students who complete their associate degrees or transfer to baccalaureate programs in three years and achieving a six-year graduation rate of 50% for baccalaureate program students. To do this, the committee recommends City Tech recognize the importance of having a representative size of Hispanic faculty and offer mentorship that is tailored to the needs of Hispanic Students.
All-in-all, this is a richly informative and easy to navigate site. Check it out for inspiration and mark your calendars with any HSI Week events you’d like to attend.
Are you teaching this semester on the OpenLab? If so, a new feature allows you to add students in bulk to your course:
Create a list of your students’ emails: you can download these in a spreadsheet from Blackboard or CUNY First.
Go to your Course Profile > Membership.
Click Invite New Members
At the bottom of the page is an option for Import Members to Your Course.
Here you can paste a list of City Tech email addresses for your students. These can be either separated by commas, or one email address per line.
Click the checkbox next to “I acknowledge that the following individuals are officially enrolled in my course or have approved this action.”
Click Import.
You will see a list of students who were successfully added to your course. They will receive an email notification that they were added.
If any students do not have OpenLab accounts, a list of their email addresses will appear below the students who were added to your course. They will need to create an account before they can be added to your course. You can also copy the email addresses and send invites to those students by clicking on “Invite the following to join the OpenLab and your Course.”
Welcome to a new academic year! The OpenLab Team has some helpful information to share:
The Fall 2021 schedule for OpenLab support is now available:
Students, faculty, and staff can sign up for open hours and one-on-one appointments to ask specific questions or ask to learn more about topics such as getting started, using the OpenLab for courses, or how to use a tool or pedagogical approach.
We have workshops slated for the next two weeks, including on Getting Started on the OpenLab, and using the Block Editor on the OpenLab.
Faculty members, have any questions about getting your course site ready for the semester? See helpful tips posted here:Teaching with the OpenLab.
Are you a student getting ready to use the OpenLab this semester? See the helpful OpenLab for Students module. If you are faculty you can refer your students to this module as well.
Get inspired by what City Tech has done on the OpenLab by looking through our past In the Spotlight posts.
The OpenLab released several new features this summer, including an option to save Courses, Projects, Clubs and Portfolios to a list of “favorites,” and a new quiz-making plug-in. You can also now add students in bulk to your course by using a list of student emails: our help documentation will walk you through how to do this step-by-step.
The OpenLab, City Tech’s open digital platform for teaching, learning, and collaboration, offers virtual open hours, online support, and technical guidance throughout the year.
On August 12, 2021 we released version 1.7.53 of the OpenLab. It was a large release, and included multiple new features, new plugins, a few bug fixes, and updates to all existing themes and plugins, and updates to WordPress and BuddyPress, the software that powers the OpenLab.
New Features
Favorites
We added a new feature called “My Favorites,” which allows OpenLab members to save Courses, Projects, Clubs, or Portfolios to a list of “Favorites.” This list appears in a dropdown menu in the My OpenLab toolbar, making it easily accessible from anywhere on the OpenLab.
Acknowledgements for Courses, Projects, and Clubs
We added additional flexibility and options to the acknowledgements that appear on the profile of Courses, Projects, and Clubs. Now you’ll be able to add additional ‘creators’ to a Course, Project, or Club. These may include creators who are not members of the OpenLab so that they can also be credited for their work.
In addition, there’s now a section where you can add custom text that will appear in an acknowledgements section on the profile. This could credit another person, work, or funding source that contributed to the creation of your site.
New ‘Creator(s)’ section in Course Settings
My OpenLab: Ability to Sort My Courses, Projects, and Clubs
We added a dropdown to the My Courses, My Projects, and My Clubs sections in My OpenLab, which will allow you to sort by last active, alphabetical, and newest, making it easier to find particular groups in My OpenLab.
Non-joinable Groups
This feature allows admins to define a Course, Project, or Club as non-joinable, meaning that the ‘Join Now’ or ‘Request Membership’ buttons will not appear on the profile. We imagine that this would be useful mainly for groups such as model courses, which are open but not intended for membership, or projects that are used as working groups that are only intended for use by a small number of people.
OpenLab Export / Import plugin
We’re releasing a plugin that will allow members to export a site on the OpenLab to be used on any other WordPress installation, such as the CUNY Academic Commons or a CBOX OpenLab installation. Since cloning can’t be done across different installations, this is a way to provide easier sharing of materials. The plugin has more features than the regular WordPress exporter, and packages up all the site contents, together with a readme file to provide context for the person importing the site contents into their own.
New Plugins
We added two new plugins:
Quiz Maker Pro replaces WP Pro Quiz, which was retired in June, and removed in this release. It provides an easy way to add quizzes, with many different options for customizing.
Posts by Tag adds a widget that allows you to display posts from different tags of your choosing.
Retired Plugins
We retired a number of plugins that are no longer being updated. These plugins will still be active on sites where they’re currently activated but won’t be available for activation on new sites. They include:
Accordion Shortcodes
ARI Fancy Lightbox
CubePoints
DK PDF
Download Media Library
Google for WP
Link Manager
WP Twitter
WP2Static
Tako Movable Comments
WP Pro Quiz, which was retired in June has now been removed entirely, to avoid any potential security risks. Unlike a retired plugin, it will no longer be available, even on sites where it was activated.
Bug Fixes
We fixed a bug in the OpenLab Attributions plugin, which caused the ‘Add Attribution’ window to close when using the down arrow on a keyboard to choose a license from the dropdown.
We discovered a conflict between two plugins: WP Lightbox2 and Gravity Forms. If both of these plugins are activated together, the panel for adding fields in Gravity Forms does not display correctly. We’re not able to fix the conflict, but want to make people aware of the issue.
Documentation in Help is coming soon for all new features. And as always, please contact us with any questions!
This week, we wrap up our summer series with two tasks that will get your course up and running before the start of the semester. These tasks involve setting up your dynamic course content as well as your first few assignments.
Task 1: Customize your Posts
Read through the posts that come pre-loaded in the new course template. By default, these are published all together in the Home page.
Note the function of these posts. Unlike pages, which you used last week to publish static content including your syllabus and course policies, posts are used to convey dynamic content, new information that will be updated throughout the semester.
Note that these pre-written template posts have 6 categories: Announcements, Surveys and Quizzes, Discussions, Student Work, Assignment Instructions, and Class Agendas. These categories can be accessed from the main navigation menu and can always be edited.
Edit each of these posts, adapting them to your course’s needs. You may decide that you don’t need some of the posts, in which case you can delete them.
Note: if you cloned a model course, please read through our faculty teaching module. You’ll want to update the cloned posts and make sure you are these posts’ author (Dashboard>Posts>Author and select yourself from the drop-down).
Task 2: Design Student Assignments
Consider the kinds of assignments that are best for remote/ hybrid learning.
Note that students may have limited access to technological resources, and may be constrained in the kind of work they can submit.
Read the Designing Assignments section in OpenLab help for links to example assignments created by your colleagues.
Do you want students to submit work you can read directly on your Course Site, or files that you can download onto your computer?
Do you want students to be able to see and respond to each other’s work?
What kind of feedback do you want to provide?
Read through the different ways you can receive student work on the OpenLab. Based on your answers to the questions above, select the way(s) you will receive student work on the OpenLab.
Once you have designed a few more assignments and decided how students will submit them, draft additional assignment instruction posts. Remember that you can save these posts as drafts for now, and schedule them to be published at a later date.
That’s it! You are now well-equipped to start the semester on the OpenLab.
This week, we suggest two tasks to guide faculty in planning their semester. Both tasks help faculty customize the OpenLab course template to communicate with their students.
Task 1: Explore Student-Instructor Communication in the Course Template
Get familiar with the different types of communication facilitated through the course template:
The template facilitates one-way communication from instructors to students. Under the Course Info tab, you will notice pages for your syllabus, the course schedule, and your contact information—all crucial content for your students to know and have access to on your site. The template also suggests using a category archive for your regularly updated announcements to students.
The template facilitates two-way communication between instructors and students. For example, the home page includes a survey for your students to fill out at the start of the semester so that you can understand the technology and working spaces available to them as they continue working off-campus. We recommend you use the data from the survey to inform your communication with students throughout the rest of the semester, as well as to inform your expectations for course assignments and participation.
The template also uses category archives for students to submit their assignments, and suggests a number of mechanisms through which you can provide feedback and grades on student work. (Note that FERPA protects student record privacy, and student work should not be graded publicly.)
The template facilitates communication between students! This is a key part of creating a lively online classroom. A category archive for Discussions creates a suggested space for students to hold class dialogue online. A first assignment is suggested to you in which students introduce themselves to each other, and encourages students to respond to each other’s introductions for extra credit.
Remember that the template is a suggested model for designing your course. It is informed by known best practices for online and hybrid teaching, but can and should be customized to suit your vision for your semester. Before you begin further customizing the template, ask yourself:
What information do my students need from me to be successful this semester? How can I support them and adapt my teaching to these unusual circumstances?
How would I like my students to communicate with me this semester? How can I pierce through some of the inertia that we are all feeling as the pandemic wears on?
What kind of class dialogue would I like to see this semester? How can I make it relevant to the current moment?
Task 2: Customize the Pages on your Course
Prepare and gather your “static” course materials for your site. “Static” here refers to those materials that your students need from day one of the semester and that won’t be updated very much as the months go by. These materials convey information from you to your students, and include:
Your syllabus.
Your contact info.
Your grading policy/ grading rubrics.
Your course schedule.
Update the pages on your course site with these materials!
If you have course readings that are available online, decide now how you will link to these readings from your OpenLab site. Please make sure to read our copyright guidelines as you do this.
Are your readings freely available online? Can you provide links in your syllabus/ class agendas/ course schedule?
Are your readings large PDF files? If so, we recommend using an external hosting service to host these files, such as Dropbox, Office 365 or other hosting service provided by the college. You can provide your students with instructions on how to access this service on your OpenLab site.
We’ll be in touch next week to help you to continue to answer: How can I further design my course to facilitate communication between students? How can I collect student work on the OpenLab?
This week, create on the OpenLab! In this case, “create” can refer to creating sites, but also to creating communities, collaborations, and dialogue by joining other sites, connecting with friends and colleagues, participating in discussion forums, and more. That said, task 2 is intended for instructors and focuses on the first steps of course creation, taking a particularly close look at the course template.
Task 1: Create Connections:
Join our 2 in-house sites to stay connected and updated about what’s happening on the OpenLab:
The Open Road: Our one-stop-shop for all things OpenLab: news, workshops, events, community, and support!
Whether you are a student, staff member, or an instructor, you may want to look at the projects for different academic departments and school bodies, which often have helpful resources. These include the College Council, the Math Education Major Project, and Peer Advisement.
You can also search for courses, projects, clubs and portfolios using the links titled by type of site (courses, projects, clubs, and portfolios) under the slider. From the search page, use the filters (top-right) to tailor your search.
Want to create a club, portfolio, or project? Learn more here.
Task 2: Create a course site! The tasks below will get you started on the task of building a site.
Follow these steps to create a course site from this template.
Take time to fill out your course profile:
Customize your course avatar. If you do not have an image for your avatar in my mind, you can search for reusable images online. You can also create an avatar of your own; Barbara Smith Mishara from Architecture, for example, has created an avatar that clearly features the name of her course and the semester. This is a great way to make your course easy to find for your students.
Include a course description and your contact information in the course profile. A good example of an information-rich but easy to read course profile is John De Santis’ Spring 2020 COMD1127 class.
Get familiar with course profile tools, including Discussion boards, Files, and Docs. You don’t have to decide now whether you will use any of these tools, but it’s a good idea to play around and see what each can do.
Under Dashboard> Appearance, you’ll have the option of changing the title to your site (we recommend making this your course’s name!), the site’s tag line (we recommend that it feature your name, the course section, and semester), and the site’s identity.
You can edit your site’s widgets. You will want to edit the “About this Course” widget to share your name, office hours, contact information, and a brief paragraph about this Course. You may also want to include a picture of yourself in the “About this Course” widget.
As always, as you begin the course creation process, we recommend consulting our example courses for inspiration and model work.
We’ll be in touch next week to help you answer: How can I design my course to facilitate communication with my students?
Part 2 of 5 of: Explore the OpenLab and Learn How to Get Help with Using the OpenLab
Greetings,
This week, we continue our 5-part self-guided series and ask: How do others use the OpenLab? How can I get help using the OpenLab? The tasks below will help everyone explore how members of the City Tech community use the OpenLab to learn, teach, build community, and pursue other scholarly and pedagogical interests. These tasks will also show how to get support using the OpenLab.
Task 3: Check out our in-house site Open Pedagogy on the OpenLab: A site for sharing and discussing resources about open digital pedagogy. This site will help you understand what we mean when we talk about learning/ teaching online and in the “open”:
Our monthly blog series, Pedagogy Profiles, features examples of how City Tech’s educators use the OpenLab to support their work. The blog series highlights how these educators embody a commitment to digital, public-facing education.
Task 4: Continue to explore the community using various search and filter options:
You can search through people, courses, projects, clubs and portfolios using the menu at the top and the magnifying glass in the top-right.
You can also search courses, projects, clubs and portfolios using the links titled by type of site (courses, projects, clubs, portfolios) under the slider. From the search page, use the filters (top-right) to tailor your search.
Task 5: As you explore, you may find yourself inspired to start creating your course or ePortfolio. To get help with these tasks and using the OpenLab you can:
Throughout this summer, we have virtual office hours: these are one-on-one consultations with a member of the OpenLab team. You’re welcome to meet with us at any stage of your work, whether you are just starting to think through how you will set up your site or whether you’re more advanced.
We are available to support you seven days a week via email at openlab@citytech.cuny.edu.
We’ll be in touch next week to help you create on the OpenLab.
A 5-Part Self-Guided Series To Get Everyone Started on the OpenLab
Part 1 of 5 of: Get to Know the OpenLab
As in past summers, we are releasing a 5-part self-guided series that provides short tasks to help everyone in the City Tech community get to know the OpenLab. Many of us will be teaching/ working remotely for the fourth straight semester. While remote teaching has become more familiar, many of us are feeling some wear from the isolation and the realities of remote work, not to mention the general anxiety of living through a global pandemic. The OpenLab team has been impressed and moved by the creativity, adaptability, and compassion that faculty, staff, and students have shown on and off the OpenLab; we also recognize that in some ways, as the pandemic wears on, enlivening an online classroom (or club, or event) is becoming increasingly difficult. The primary goal of this series is to introduce everyone to the OpenLab, but it is also to highlight strategies for combating inertia and cultivating an online community.
Each week, we will guide everyone through different tasks to start or reinvigorate their work on the OpenLab. Tasks are oriented around different questions, beginning with the most basic question – How do I join the OpenLab? The tasks below will help you create an account and set up your OpenLab profile.
Task 1: Before joining the OpenLab, learn more about the platform. Read the OpenLab’s briefAbout page to learn more about the ethos and values driving the OpenLab. Take the OpenLab Tour for a deeper discussion of OpenLab courses, clubs, projects and portfolios.
Task 3: Set up your OpenLab profile. You’ll notice as you do this that only some fields are required. You can always come back and complete missing information later when you have time to learn how to manage your account and profile. That said, we recommend filling out as much as you’re comfortable with in this early stage: your OpenLab profile communicates who you are to the OpenLab community. If your OpenLab profile is public, it can also be indexed in internet search engines.
What kind of relevant information would you like to include here? If you are a student, you may want to specify your major/minor, contact information, pronouns, extracurricular interests, any awards or honors you have received, and even a brief overview of your projects and goals.
If you are faculty or staff, you will want to make your contact information available to your students and colleagues, and you may also choose to detail some of your academic interests, as well your experiences and roles within the college.
Finally, profiles provide the opportunity for OpenLab members to include a photo associated with their OpenLab display name: please note that this photo can be of anything that you feel represents you adequately, and does not have to be an actual photo of yourself.
Task 4: Practice logging in to your account. Sign out of your account and close your browser. Then open a new browser window, navigate back to the OpenLab, and log in to your account
We’ll be in touch next week to help you answer: How do others use the OpenLab?
