Category: OpenLab News

On November 19, 2020 we released version 1.7.47 of the OpenLab. It included two new features and five new plugins, as well as a few minor plugin and theme updates.

New Features

1. We added a link on Course, Project, and Club directory pages allowing OpenLab members to create or clone these groups from the directory page, in addition to the usual location in My OpenLab. Please note that you must be logged in for the links to be visible, and the link on the Courses directory page will only be visible to faculty.
   
   
   
   
2. We added a link to My OpenLab on the red login box on the homepage of the OpenLab, to make it even quicker and easier to access.
   
   

Plugins

We added five new plugins:

1. Advanced Sidebar Menu: allows you to add a widget to your sidebar that generates a menu based on the section of your site you’re viewing. It will show all the subpages related to the page being viewed, and could be helpful for sites with large amounts of content.
   
   
2. Nested Pages – This plugin replaces the functionality of the Page Mash plugin, which is no longer supported and has been retired. It provides an easy interface for dragging and dropping pages to change the order and hierarchy of all pages on your site.
   
   
3. Breadcrumb – This plugin allows you to add breadcrumb navigation to any theme, and using a shortcode. We have another plugin called Breadcrumb NavXT, but it only works with OpenLab Twenty Sixteen and OpenLab Twenty Thirteen themes. 
   
   
4. Pager Widget – This simple widget allows you to add next and back links to navigate between pages on your site. 
   
   
5. ARI Fancy Lightbox – this plugin adds a mobile-friendly lightbox effect to images on any site. It works with individual images, native WordPress galleries, and can also be used with the NextGEN Gallery plugin as the preferred lightbox for NextGEN galleries.

Documentation for the new plugins is coming soon.

As always, please contact us with any questions!

On September 21, 2020 we released version 1.7.45 of the OpenLab. It was a fairly large release, and included improvements to cloning functionality, a few additional improvements and updates, and a new plugin.

Changes to Cloning Functionality

1. In shared cloning, authorship of all content from the group being cloned will now be switched by default to the person cloning the group. For example, if you clone a model course created by Professor Smith, unless you change the authorship settings, you will appear as the author for all posts and pages on your cloned site rather than Professor Smith. This setting can be changed during the cloning process if you would prefer to retain the same authorship.

2. We made a few changes to the “Credits” section on the profile of groups that have been created through shared cloning. Credits are now called “Acknowledgements” and they have been moved down and reformatted slightly.

3. On cloneable groups, we added to the course profile a count that shows the number of times the group has been cloned, with a link to view all clones of that group.

4. An additional change was made for both shared and regular cloning. Rather than copy privacy and member role settings from the group being cloned, you will now see the usual default settings during the cloning process, where you can choose whatever you would like for these settings.

Changes to Search and Badges

We made a few improvements to the new search and filter functionality introduced in the August release, and the “badges” that differentiate types of Courses, Projects, Clubs, and Portfolios:

1. Searches that include members’ names are better matched with faculty name or project/club contact.
2. You can now use quotes in your search to include multiple terms so that results include all terms rather than any of the terms.
3. To improve clarity, we changed the short version of the “Cloneable” badge from “Clone” to the full name, “Cloneable.”

Other Fixes

1. We fixed an issue with “Button” blocks, causing buttons created with an outline style to be invisible in the Block Editor.
2. We fixed some display issues with the Search & Filter sidebar widget (part of the Search & Filter plugin).
3. We made a few more minor theme styling fixes for Education Pro and Hemingway.

New Plugin

We added the Post Types Order plugin, which allows you to change the order of posts and pages through a simple drag and drop interface.

Retired and Removed Plugins

We retired one plugin that is no longer being updated and removed one for security reasons.

1. Google Docs Embedder was no longer being maintained and was not working consistently. For this reason we retired it, which means that it will still be active on sites where it’s currently activated but won’t be available for activation on new sites.
2. Captcha was removed from the wordpress.org plugin repository for security reasons. Out of caution we have removed rather than retired it. This means it won’t be available on sites where it was activated, and won’t be available for activation on new sites.

As always, please contact us with any questions!

This semester, you may have noticed Model Courses and Course Hubs on the OpenLab. 

Model Courses

• Model Courses are department-specific OpenLab courses that faculty can clone to use with their students, via the OpenLab’s “shared cloning” feature.
• They are built by course coordinators and/or other faculty, reviewed by colleagues, and assigned a “Model” badge by the OpenLab team.
• Model courses contain course information, example assignments, resources for students, and other materials, and are designed to help faculty meet recommended best practices for teaching online.
• They are created as freely-available open educational resources (OER), meaning that faculty can choose to use them in whole or in part, adapting and remixing them to meet their needs, and they can be accessed by all, including faculty and students using Blackboard. 

Three departments/programs created Model Courses as part of the OpenLab Model Course Initiative in the summer: Communication Design, the English Department’s First Year Writing program, and Mathematics. 

You can find them in the Courses directory by checking the “Model” checkbox. 

Faculty and students are already using the Model Courses this semester: the Profile page shows how many times each course has been cloned. 

Course Hubs

• Depending on the department, Course Hubs may contain course materials for students and faculty to use alongside the model courses and/or resources to help faculty who are teaching the course. 
• Like Model Courses, they are built by course coordinators and/or other faculty, reviewed by colleagues, and assigned a “Department Resource” badge by the OpenLab team.
• They are not designed to be cloned but, like Model Courses, are created as freely-available open educational resources (OER), so they can be accessed by all, including faculty and students using Blackboard. 

The English First Year Writing team created a single Course Hub designed to support faculty teaching with the Model Courses. 

The Math Department team created a Course Hub for each of the Model Courses; they’re  designed to act as a central resource for courses with syllabus, lessons, review sheets, and other resources for students and faculty. Faculty can link to the Course Hub from their own course in Blackboard or OpenLab, use it to supplement their own instruction, or as part of a “flipped classroom” model. Students can use it to catch up or refresh their knowledge, check out a course, or prepare for an exam.  

You can find Course Hubs in the Projects directory by checking the “Department Resources” checkbox. 

Freely available for all!

Both Model Courses and Course Hubs are open educational resources (OER) made freely available on the OpenLab for others to use, edit, and remix. Because they’re available to everyone, they can be accessed by faculty and students here at City Tech and anywhere in the world. 

Want to learn more?

Interested in bringing Model Courses and/or Course Hubs to your Department? Contact the OpenLab team! We’re happy to help and advise.  

For general information and instructions on cloning a Model Course, see the Working with Model Courses section of Teaching with the OpenLab. 

For more about the Communication Design Model Courses and how they were created, check out the Working with a Model Course and Model Course Development sections of the COMD Pedagogy Project.

For more about the Mathematics materials, see the Model Course and Course Hub sections of the Math Department Instructor Resources site. 

On August 4, 2020 we released version 1.7.44 of the OpenLab. It was a large release, and included multiple new features, new plugins, updates to all existing themes and plugins, and updates to WordPress and BuddyPress, the software that powers the OpenLab.

New Features

1. We redesigned and expanded the “badges” feature used to differentiate different types of Courses, Projects, Clubs, and Portfolios. Previously, we had badges for Open Educational Resources (OER) and First Year Learning Communities (FYLC), which could be used to filter courses on the directory page. We still have these two badges, but we’ve added the following:
   
   1. Cloneable: groups that can be cloned via shared cloning
   2. Open: groups that have open privacy settings
   3. Model: courses or projects that serve as cloneable models that have been peer reviewed to meet standards for best practices. Read more about model courses on our self-paced faculty training module, Teaching with the OpenLab.
   4. Department Resource: courses or projects that serve as resources for departments, such as model courses, course hubs, or department project sites.
   5. College Resource: sites that serve as college-wide resources, such as the City Tech Guide.
      
2. Related to the new badges, we made a number of significant changes to search on the OpenLab to make it easier to find Courses, Projects, Clubs, and Portfolios:
   
   1. We revised the search box that appears at the top of the OpenLab site so that it searches across all types of groups—Courses, Projects, Clubs, and Portfolios. For example, if you search for “design” in the top search, you will now see all Courses, Projects, Clubs, and Portfolios with the keyword “design” in the title or description of the group.
   2. On the results page for this site-wide search, you can further refine the results to search only in particular groups, as well as the usual filters of school, department, etc. You can also use the new group badges to narrow down search. These additional ways of searching were also added in each of the group directory pages: Courses, Projects, Clubs, and Portfolios.
      
3. The WordPress Block Editor (also known as Gutenberg) is now the default editor for all new sites on the OpenLab, but the Classic Editor is still available for anyone who wishes to use it. Read more on the Open Road about the transition to the Block Editor.
   
4. Discussion, Docs, and Files—some of the tools available on a group’s profile—are now deactivated by default when you create a new group with a site. However, they can be turned on in the group profile settings. We found that they are not used very often when the group also has a site and can sometimes be confusing, providing too many potential places to add content. However, they are activated by default for all new groups that don’t have a site.
   
5. We made a change to site menus so that the Profile and Home links automatically included in the site menu can be edited or removed. The Profile link can now be found in a section called “OpenLab” so if it’s removed, it can be re-added. The Home link can be re-added as a custom link.
   
6. We made a few improvements to the appearance of the Library widgets that can be added to the sidebar of a site.
   
7. There were some improvements made behinds the scenes to cloning that will improve the process for groups with a lot of content on the site.

New Plugins

We added four new plugins in this release:

1. Highlighter Pro: logged-in members of the OpenLab can highlight and comment on specific sections of text on a post or page, allowing for more fine-grained engagement on a site than usual commenting.
   
2. Gravity Forms Image Choices allows you to add images to a Gravity Forms quiz or survey.
   
3. Setmore Plus allows you to add an appointment scheduler to your site.
   
4. Meks Smart Social Widget is a simple plugin allowing you to add icons with links to your social media sites to your site sidebar.

Improvements to existing features

1. We made some improvements to the Easy Table of Contents plugin—in particular, the feature that allows you to add a TOC widget to your site’s sidebar and “stick” the widget to the side of the page as you scroll down. For sites with a lot of content, this can be useful as a secondary navigation menu.
   
2. We made a few small changes to the sign up page to help clarify that members don’t need to use their real name as their username, and that it can’t be changed once signup is complete. We also moved the Display Name field up to appear closer to user name. Display name is what members use to identify themselves publicly and it can be anything they choose.
   
3. A number of small display and color improvements were made to the Education Pro, Hemingway, and Hamilton themes.

Retired Plugins

We retired a number of plugins that are no longer being updated and/or are not used by OpenLab members. 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:

1. Achievements
2. Awesome Flickr Gallery
3. BadgeOS
4. BadgeOS BadgeStack Add-On
5. Captcha
6. Cardboard
7. Category Order & Taxonomy Terms Order
8. Gravity Forms Directory & Add-ons
9. HTML Import2
10. Mihdan: Ajax Edit Comments (Editing comments is now part of default WordPress functionality so the plugin is unnecessary.)
11. Page Links To
12. pageMash
13. Page Tagger
14. Simple Drop Cap
15. Simple Pull Quote
16. Table of Contents Plus (We still have Easy Table of Contents.)
17. WP Simple Anchor Links
18. WP-Pro-Quiz
19. WP-SWFObject
20. WPBadgeDisplay
21. WPBadger

Bug Fixes

We fixed one bug and identified another plugin conflict that can’t be fixed right now.

1. There was an issue with gallery blocks in the Block editor, where when a new gallery block was added, and you tried to add images from the Media Library there would be a message that “No items were found”. Navigating to the “Edit Gallery” link shows that all media library items had already been added.
   
2. There’s a conflict between the TinyMCE Advanced plugin and Block editor where when the plugin is activated, the shortcut for choosing a new block type by typing “/block name” doesn’t work. We’re not able to fix this conflict right now, so please be aware of it.

As always, please contact us with any questions!

We have a brand new online self-paced training module for faculty: Teaching with the OpenLab. The site provides resources and best practices to help you use the OpenLab effectively when teaching online, or (in the future) hybrid or in person.

You’ll find step-by-step help for signing up, creating your course, and setting up your course site, whether you’re creating a course on the OpenLab using the new course template, or cloning a model course provided by your department. 

You’ll also find guidance on every aspect of teaching with the OpenLab: preparing course materials, communicating with your students, designing and receiving assignments, providing feedback and grades, and getting your students started. 

Finally, the site provides a list of common-sense best practices for digital pedagogy that you can use to evaluate your approach.

Let us know what you think! There’s a feedback form at the end of the module: as always, your comments will help us help everyone teaching with the OpenLab. 

Need help? Contact us at openlab@citytech.cuny.edu anytime!

A new look for new courses!

We’ve just introduced a new template for courses on the OpenLab. The OpenLab course template determines how courses appear when they’re first created; existing courses won’t be affected.

Check out the new course template on the Course Template demo site.

Included in the new version:

• A fresh new look (using the Hemingway theme);
• A structured menu to help faculty and students find and organize their work using categories;
• Built-in help and resources for students;
• A set of recommended plugins and widgets, automatically enabled to make working in the course site easier;
• An optional discussion post (introductions) to help faculty and students get to know one another;
• An optional student survey that faculty can use to understand how their students are situated regarding technology, working space, etc.
• Suggested templates for your syllabus, schedule, class agendas, and assignments.

Why now?

The template is designed to support best practices for teaching online and for using the OpenLab platform, such as using categories to organize course content. It’s also designed to provide a more consistent experience for students using courses on the OpenLab.

Want to make changes?

Please do! As always, you can change your course however you like so that it suits you and your students.

Need help?

We have a Course Template Tour and OpenLab Help overview available now, with a faculty training module coming very soon. In the meantime, as always, you can reach the  friendly OpenLab team at openlab@citytech.cuny.edu.

Feedback?

If you have thoughts about the new look for courses, let us know in the comments below or contact us anytime. All feedback – positive or negative – is very welcome!

In December 2018 with the release of WordPress 5.0, the Block editor (also known as Gutenberg) became the new default post editor, replacing the editor that has been around since the beginning, now called the “Classic” editor.

The Block editor is much more powerful than just a text editor, making it easier to build page layouts and integrate text with visual page elements, without any coding needed.

It has been installed on the OpenLab for the past year, but the Classic editor has been the default, until now. After the OpenLab summer release on August 4, the Block editor will become the default for all new sites, but the Classic editor will still be available for use on any site, or on individual posts and pages. Existing sites currently using the Classic editor will not be switched to the Block editor, unless you choose to change editors.

We encourage everyone to start using the Block editor, and explore all that you can do with Blocks! However, we have instructions for how to switch to the Classic editor if you would prefer to keep using it.

The Classic editor will be officially supported by WordPress through the end of 2021, and while it will likely continue to work for some time after that, it will become more obsolete over time. 

We have a number of pages in OpenLab Help, including:

• What is the Block editor?
• Working with blocks
• Writing a post
• Adding images & other media
• Embedding video and other media

There are also many helpful tutorials and introductions online. Here are a few good ones:

• Say Hello to the New Editor (WordPress.org)
• How to Use the New WordPress Block Editor (Code in WP)
• How to Use the New WordPress Block Editor (WP Beginner)
• The Complete Anatomy Of The Gutenberg WordPress Editor (Smashing Magazine)

And as always, feel free to contact us with any questions or concerns, or stop by our virtual office hours!