Category: Faculty Resources

This week, we spotlight Professor Kan’s Mat1275CO, an OpenLab course on College Algebra and Trigonometry. The course shows how you can loosely adapt the OpenLab course template for your teaching:

• Notice how clean the site design is. The main menu is sparse and fits on one line, with only four main items. The home page is dynamic, such that Professor Kan’s newest announcements are posted on there in reverse chronological order. This is a great way to communicate quickly and regularly with your students. It is also the default set-up of the OpenLab course template.
  
• Professor Kan makes great use of the sidebar widget space. As a reminder, widgets appear on all pages on your site and they are a great space to communicate information you really don’t want your readers/ students to miss. For example, Professor Kan includes information about office hours, class meetings, how to access student email, and a link to the Dropbox where students will be submitting their work. Note that Professor Kan has made a video to show students how to use Dropbox from a smartphone. These kinds of help materials are always appreciated and featuring them in the widget space is a great idea!
  
• Finally, we really like that Professor Kan has left an option for students to get points back on their exam. At our last Open Pedagogy event, we discussed how to lower the stakes of grading and make the process transparent, fair, and compassionate. Some students excel at exams. Others find them extremely anxiety-producing. Others might have an off-day (week, month) on the day the exam is given. There is much conversation circulating at CUNY on how to ground our pedagogy in care for students and ourselves, in compassion for the extraordinary circumstances through which we are living. Offering students an opportunity to redo incorrect problems on an exam is one point of entry into this type of pedagogy. This practice lowers the stakes of what would otherwise be a one-time test: it gives students multiple ways to do well in course.

In both its substantive content and its site design, MAT1275CO leaves much to be admired! Check it out for inspiration!

This week, we spotlight Professor Kim’s OpenLab course on Urban Sociology. The course offers wonderful examples of how to use the OpenLab to support multimodal learning.

First, notice how Professor Kim breaks up the information on the course site into manageable chunks. The home page features a picture that Professor Kim has taken (all the pictures on the site are taken by Professor Kim!) and a brief course description. The syllabus is broken up into five smaller pages for course objectives, course requirements, course policies, a weekly schedule and FAQs. The FAQs are a very nice touch: they explain how students will be using both the OpenLab and Blackboard for their coursework, with screenshots of how to use the latter. Note that Professor Kim also includes main menu items for Readings, Study Guides, and Assignments.  This lay-out is straightforward and keeps the content of each page brief.

Second, Professor Kim puts place-based-learning into action on this course site. This course in Urban Sociology grounds itself in assignments focused on Downtown Brooklyn, where City Tech is located. This is an excellent way to illustrate course themes in real time, with a real and relatable place.  Course topics such as gentrification, the new economy, and the development of urban universities (sometimes called “studentification”) are all observable from the windows of City Tech buildings. But Professor Kim also invites students to examine images of downtown development posted to the OpenLab, read accounts from local papers, reflect on how they have seen the neighborhood change over the course of the past few years, and simply walk down the street for “field trips.” These are all wonderful ways of leveraging the OpenLab to foster multimodal teaching and learning.

Third, I draw attention to Professor Kim’s Writing: Dos & Don’ts page. If you are grading students on writing, it is important to give clear and comprehensive guidance for what you expect of a good paper. Different faculty have different expectations, and students have no reason to know what kind of citation style you require, whether you prefer paraphrasing or direct quotations of primary sources, or what kind of tone you expect in scholarly writing. Professor Kim has laid out expectations and linked to writing guides and videos. These are all good practices. With so much variation among classes, it is helpful to offer students technical and not just substantive support in writing their papers.

All in all, Professor Kim’s OpenLab course on Urban Sociology illustrates several best practices in place-based and online learning. Check it out for inspiration!

This week, we spotlight the OpenLab Community Team’s very own Olivia Wood. Specifically, we take a look at Olivia Wood’s OpenLab Teaching Portfolio, which offers an example of a compelling and clean site design that allows her to communicate her identity as  an instructor clearly and succinctly.

To begin, we note that the OpenLab offers all faculty and staff the possibility of creating a digital portfolio. Portfolios can be used to showcase any type of work, whether it be research, teaching or service accomplishments. 

Olivia has used the portfolio space to highlight her teaching, painting a robust picture of herself as an instructor without overwhelming her reader with too much detail. For example, her Home page features her statement of teaching philosophy, introducing readers to her general values as an educator. 

Her perspectives on teaching are then demonstrated concretely through separate pages that feature (in order on her main menu): courses taught, annotated assignments, examples of student work and observations and evaluations. There are two things to note here. The first is that while Olivia could have featured multiple pages of work on each of these subjects, she smartly chooses to give excerpts to make the content more digestible. So, she links out to a full syllabus of course, giving just a paragraph overview in the actual courses taught page. And she gives summary statistics of her teaching evaluations rather than featuring the full multi-page evaluation documents.

Second, she protects the privacy of her students by making her student work page password-protected. This is a good reminder that 1) student consent is needed to post student work; 2) privacy settings can be set at the page or post level and just for the site as a whole. Instructions for altering privacy settings are here.

All in all, Olivia’ teaching portfolio offers a straightforward and compelling narrative of who she is and what she has done as an instructor. Check it out for inspiration!

This week, we spotlight the Faculty Publication Support Workshop Series OpenLab site. This is “a joint initiative of the Faculty Commons and the Library’s Scholarly Communications Committee” which “supports City Tech faculty in their scholarship and publishing.” Note how sleek the logo is– kudos to Faculty Commons Graphic Designer Savonne Andrews for the design!

The site uses the 2015 theme, which works very well here as the site functions primarily as a blog, with regular announcements posted to the Home page. If you are also using your site primarily as a one-way communication tool to other OpenLab members, this is a smart design. You can use posts to remind members of upcoming meetings and use a pinned post at the top of your feed to give an overview of your project’s goals. The Faculty Publication Support site’s pinned post, for example, notes that workshops are monthly, include guest speakers, and group discussions. 

We also like how the Workshop series links out to other pre-existing resources on publishing, such as the Library’s Resources for Academic Publishing. While it might seem counterintuitive, it is better to break up information into smaller chunks in this way. Here, the Publication Workshop Series site is reserved for information about the workshops themselves. Broader resources on publication are kept separate, which helps avoid confusion about where to go for what information.

We also like that the Workshop Series makes materials for the actual meetings available on their OpenLab site. They link out to the page with a Meeting Schedule in their main menu. On this page, an overview for each meeting is given and materials used (for example, slide decks, recordings of the session, etc.) are posted. This is a best practice to carry over to your OpenLab courses as well, even if you post your materials elsewhere, or email them to participants. It is good to have these things in multiple places. How many of us have gone back to an organization or class’ website after a meeting only to find that the recording we needed isn’t there! Making your site a living repository of workshop/ course materials makes everyone’s life so much easier!

Please take a look at the Faculty Publication Support Workshop Series OpenLab site. It is a great model for projects, clubs, and courses!

Are you teaching this semester on the OpenLab? If so, a new feature allows you to directly add students via an email list to your course:

Sources:

This page is a derivative of “OpenLab Help” used under CC-BY-NC-SA 3.0.

This week, we spotlight Anne Marie Sowder’s OpenLab Portfolio, which highlights her teaching, service and research in innovative ways. It can serve as a great model for faculty who want to use the OpenLab to communicate their accomplishments to colleagues, students and employers. Some things to note about the portfolio:

• The Welcome page begins by highlighting Professor Sowder’s teaching! Though the main menu links out to her full Teaching Portfolio, Professor Sowder gives readers a sense of who she is as an educator on the landing page. Beginning with her teaching experience signals to the reader that this work is just as important as her research. Smartly, her teaching goals are listed in concise bullet point form, and readers are pointed to the Teaching Portfolio if they would like to know more.
  
  
• The Teaching Portfolio is complete with syllabi, student evaluations, and a teaching philosophy. But I particularly love that Professor Sowder’s Student Researchers are highlighted as well! On the one hand, one of the best ways to communicate to the outside world who you are as an educator is to convey who your students are. On the other hand, students deserve acknowledgement for all of the contributions they make to faculty projects: this is a lovely way to give them the credit that they are due.
  

All in all, this is a strong model of a faculty portfolio that mixes visual elements with a clear and concise narrative. It paints a vivid picture of Professor Sowder’s work and contributions! Visit Anne Marie Sowder’s site if you would like to know more.