Author: Jody R. Rosen

A 5-Part Self-Guided Series To Get Everyone Started on the OpenLab

Part 5 of 5: Planning your Semester, Pt. 2

Now that you’ve worked through Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4 of the OpenLab Summer Series, let’s work through Part 5! In this final installment, we wrap up our summer series with two tasks that will get your course up and running for 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 new courses. By default, these are published, but you can edit them as needed. 
  • Note the function of these posts. Unlike pages, which you used in Part 4 to publish 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 different categories. 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, or don’t need them yet, in which case you can switch them to drafts.

Task 2: Design Student Assignments

• Read the Designing Assignments section in OpenLab help for links to example assignments created by your colleagues.
• Decide how you will  collect student work. Consider the following:
  • Do you want students to submit work you can read directly on your Course Site, links to work stored elsewhere, 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 and where?
• 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.
  • Design your assignments. Remember that you can save these posts as drafts for now, and schedule them to be published at a later date.
  • As with any other content you share on your site, be sure to consider readability and accessibility.

You are now well-equipped to start the semester on the OpenLab. The OpenLab Community Team is of course available to help you at any point in your process, so check our Support offerings, read through our Teaching with the OpenLab and OpenLab for Students modules, search through Help, or email the OpenLab Community Team with a question.

A 5-Part Self-Guided Series To Get Everyone Started on the OpenLab

Part 4 of 5: Planning your Semester, Pt. 1

We hope that Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3 of the OpenLab Summer Series have helped you get ready to plan your semester in Part 4!

In this installment, we suggest two tasks to guide faculty in planning for the fall semester. Both tasks help faculty customize their OpenLab course site to communicate with their students. 

Before you begin further customizing your course site, ask yourself:

• What information do students need from me to be successful this semester?
• How would I like students to communicate with me this semester?
• What kind of class dialogue would I like to foster?

Task 1: Explore Student-Instructor Communication

• Get familiar with the different types of communication your course site can facilitate: Instructors can communicate information through pages, posts, and comments. Students can’t write pages, but can write posts and comments.
  • Pages are for static information, such as the course syllabus, schedule, grading information, and contact information–the kinds of content students will find in the Course Info section of the course site.
  • Posts show up at the top of the site, generate a notification via email to all members of the course, and pop your course to the top of the Courses section on the home page and Courses page on the OpenLab. You can assign categories to posts to organize them into category archives–when you add category archives to your menu, it makes it easy to find content, such as all the Class Agendas (posted by the instructor), or all the work for Project 1 (posted by students and the instructor). A category archive for Discussions creates a suggested space for students to hold class dialogue online. A first assignment is suggested for instructors in which students introduce themselves to each other, and are encouraged to respond to each other’s introductions.
  • Comments can generate dialogue within a site. Depending on the settings you choose, anyone can write a comment (that the instructor can approve or not), which show up below a page or post. Comments can be threaded, creating the opportunity for more discussion among students and the instructor. They can also include links and images. Assignments can be designed to take advantage of the openness of comments–whether by asking students to comment on a post before they even have OpenLab accounts, or by inviting students to comment on work on other sites throughout the OpenLab. Comments can also be useful for feedback and grades on student work. (Note that FERPA protects student record privacy, and student work should not be graded publicly.)
• Professors can share surveys as posts on the home page to gather information about students in the course, or even to collect student work. These surveys are powered by a plugin called Gravity Forms. 

Task 2: Customize the Pages on your Course

• Prepare and gather your course materials for your site, keeping reading ease and accessibility in mind. These materials convey information from you to your students, and include:
  • Your syllabus
  • Your contact information
  • 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. 
  • Are your materials accessible? Can someone using an assistive device access all of the information on your syllabus and in other course materials? The OpenLab has compiled materials to help you make your work accessible.

In our final installment, we’ll focus on further facilitating communication on your course site and on finishing touches.

A 5-Part Self-Guided Series To Get Everyone Started on the OpenLab

Part 3 of 5: Create on the OpenLab

As the summer moves on and the semester gets closer, we hope that Part 1 and Part 2 of the OpenLab Summer Series have helped you get started with creating your account, updating your profile, and exploring what you might want to create. Now in Part 3, we take on creating: 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 below 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 in-house sites to stay connected and updated about what’s happening in the OpenLab community. The Open Road has OpenLab news, information about workshops and other support, and events; Open Pedagogy on the OpenLab is a site for sharing and discussing resources about open digital pedagogy.
  • Browse or search through to join other projects and clubs that relate to your interests. Don’t stop there–look through courses and portfolios as well to get to know who’s doing what. Use the filters to tailor your search.
  • Connect with friends: find other members you know and invite them to connect with you.
  • Learn more about how to create a club, portfolio, or project (or if you’re a faculty member, a course)?
• Task 2: If you’re a faculty member, create your Fall 2023 course!
  • Look to colleague’s course sites as mentor sites! Find examples of the same course, other coursese in your department, or other courses that seem engaging to you. Working in the open means that colleagues can share ideas, techniques, and design, giving credit where appropriate.
  • Decide if you’re going to create a course or clone a course. You can also take advantage of what we call shared cloning to use someone else’s course as a starting point for yours.
  • Using the filters in the Courses page, check to see if there is a model course for the course you’re teaching. That’s a course developed by colleagues in your department that you can clone and tailor for your instance. Or if there’s a site that seems like it would work well for your course, see if its instructor made it cloneable–then you can work to tailor it instead of starting from the beginning of course creation.
  • Customize your course’s profile for your course community. Choose a privacy setting for the profile an site, add an avatar (if you don’t have an image, find a reusable images online) and a course description, and decide if you’ll want to use the available Discussions, Docs, and the File Library.
  • Customize your course’s site as well. Add a header image, and revise the site’s title and tagline or subtitle–we recommend using your course name as the title, and including instructor’s name, course number, and semester/year in the subtitle. 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.

In our 4th installment, we’ll look at facilitating communication between instructors and students–and among students–in courses for Fall 2023.

A 5-Part Self-Guided Series To Get Everyone Started on the OpenLab

Part 2 of 5: Explore the OpenLab and Learn How to Get OpenLab Help

Welcome back–we hope you had an easy time following along with Part 1 last week and now have your account set up, your avatar added, and your profile full of the pieces of information you want to share! Even if you’re not new to the OpenLab, getting your profile in order is useful–you can edit your profile and change your avatar easily.

This week, for Part 2 of the 5-part self-guided series, we explore to learn how others use the OpenLab to learn, teach, build community, and pursue other scholarly, pedagogical, and extra-curricular interests. We’ll also show how to get support for using the OpenLab.

• Task 1: Browse through the OpenLab to learn more about what you can do and what working in the open means:
  • Check out In the Spotlight, our blog series that features a different exemplary site each week. Begin with the  Spotlight Archive. If you are a student, you may want to scroll through some student ePortfolios and clubs. If you are a faculty member, you may want to scroll through some spotlighted courses. If you are a staff member, you may want to look at some spotlighted projects.
  • 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”–from more local topics like adding a final post to a site, to larger issues like the importance of accessibility in our digital spaces, to reminders for and some background info about coworking sessions.
  • 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. Also, you can also search courses, projects, clubs and portfolios –you’ll also find these links under the slider on the OpenLab home page, and in the bar that runs across the top of the OpenLab, and also in the OpenLab menu that you’ll find on the top left corner. From the search page, use the filters (top-right) to tailor your search. Here’s some help showing how you can use the filters, in this case to find a project.
    
• Task 2: As you explore, you may find yourself inspired to start creating your course, project, club, or portfolio. To get help with these tasks and using the OpenLab you can:
  • Check out our extensive Help section – it has everything you need to get started joining and building sites on the OpenLab. Get help with everything from Creating a Course, inviting students, sharing materials, and using the WordPress block editor to create content on the OpenLab.
  • Throughout this summer, we have virtual office hours that we call open hours available by request: these  one-on-one consultations with a member of the OpenLab team are open for anyone to sign up for and participate in. 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 at a more advanced stage. As we get closer to the start of the semester, we will share a schedule for open hours and sign-up instructions for open hours, co-working sessions, and workshops.
  • We are available to support you seven days a week via email at openlab@citytech.cuny.edu or via the Contact Us form on the Help page.

Stay tuned for Part 3 of 5, to learn more about creating a site on the OpenLab!

A 5-Part Self-Guided Series To Get Everyone Started on the OpenLab

Part 1 of 5: Get to Know the OpenLab

Every summer, the OpenLab Community Team publishes a 5-part series that provides short tasks to help everyone in the City Tech community get to know the OpenLab. That means the semester is 5 weeks away! Every year, City Tech welcomes new students, staff, and faculty members–we’re hoping that if you’re new, or were new not so long ago, you’re finding your way here to learn more! The OpenLab community continues to impress with creativity, adaptability, and compassion that members use to create and collaborate on the OpenLab. We hope that as this series introduces everyone to the OpenLab, it also highlights strategies for cultivating and growing this online community. 

Each week, we will guide everyone through different tasks to start or reinvigorate their work on the OpenLab.  For this first installment, 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 brief About page to learn more about the ethos and values driving the OpenLab. Take some time to browse through the courses, clubs, projects and portfolios on the OpenLab.

• Task 2: Sign up for an OpenLab Account. To sign up, you’ll also need access to your City Tech email account. See the OpenLab’s help documentation on Accessing your City Tech email if you need help. If you’re eager to get started but know your email account is still not available, reach out to us to see if we can help you get started sooner!

• 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. Your OpenLab profile communicates who you are to the OpenLab community; it can also be indexed in internet search engines, so think carefully about what information you share in your profile. Remember that your user name and your display name do not need to be your real name. Some members use first initial last name, or first name last initial, but others go with something altogether different–it’s up to you to choose a pseudonym that you feel will represent you while also is appropriate to the community you’re joining. Keep in mind that your user name can’t change, but you can change your display name and anything else in your profile.
  • If you are a student, you may want to specify your major/minor, contact information (remember, this is publicly available, so consider what you include carefully!), 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, in addition to including your pronouns and contact information (remember, this is publicly available!), you may also choose to detail some of your academic interests, as well as 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 your photo can be of anything that you feel represents you adequately, and does not have to be an actual photo of yourself. This avatar may appear wherever you contribute on the OpenLab.

• 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.

Stay tuned for Part 2 of 5, when we look at how others use the OpenLab!