Version 1.7.76 of the OpenLab was released on December 17. This release was small, but did include some important new features and a bug fix.
Features
We added the ability to disable and enable Discussion, Docs, and Files on the profile page of any Course, Project, or Club. If you don’t use any of these tools you can now disable them, and they can always be enabled again if you decide to use them. By default these tools are enabled for new Courses, Projects, and Clubs, but they can be disabled in Profile > Settings > Settings, in the Discussion, Docs, and Files Settings section.
Two additional improvements to the Anthologize plugin were also included in this release. When editing a project, you are now able to view more details about each page and post, including categories, tags, and author, as you’re choosing them to add to a project. In addition, when exporting a project to save as a pdf or other file type, the author is now generated automatically from all post and page authors included in that project.
Bug Fix
We fixed a printing-related issue causing the OpenLab footer to overlap with content on a page or post when printing from an OpenLab site.
The last two OpenLab updates were on October 15 and November 13, 2019, for versions 1.7.25 and 1.7.26 of the OpenLab. They were both fairly small releases, but each included some notable new features.
Features
The October release included an improvement for staff profiles, which has been under development for quite some time. Staff are now able to add their office or department to their profile, which can also be used as a filter to search for staff members on the OpenLab People page.
The November release included an update to the default tagline for Openlab sites, which used to be “Just another City Tech OpenLab site.” Now each tagline is specific to the type of site, such as “A City Tech OpenLab Course Site.” However, we still encourage members to create their own unique site tagline that briefly describes their site!
OpenLab members may also notice that the Users page of their site Dashboard includes a column with the Display Names of all site members. Hopefully this will make it easier to identify each member, and match usernames with Display Names and real (first and last) names. As a reminder, members may choose to remain pseudonymous, and should never be required to use their real name unless they choose to do so.
Plugins
We made a number of enhancements to the Anthologize plugin, including a number of accessibility improvements to the dashboard interface. We are also including some changes to the formatting and options available for PDF exports. These include improvements in the way image captions display, and the way text wraps around images. In addition, we added options for including the author and date for a post or page being included in a project.
We added one plugin, Easy Table of Contents, which improves upon the functionality of the Table of Contents plugin we currently have installed but is no longer being maintained by its developer. We recommend that members use Easy Table of Contents rather than Table of Contents Plus, but the latter does still work.
Bug Fixes
Both releases included a few small bug fixes. One was a bug in the Twenty Sixteen theme that caused the black border to be fixed when scrolling down a longer page. There was another bug which prevented Course, Project, or Club admins from “unbanning” a member who had previously been banned from the group. Now the interface that allows admins to unban members can once again be found in the Membership section of a group’s profile.
Ever since the OpenLab launched at City Tech back in Fall 2011, the OpenLab team has been asked: “How can I get the OpenLab at my campus?” There wasn’t a good answer, until now.
The OpenLab team is excited to announce the public release of Commons In A Box OpenLab, a free open-source software platform for teaching, learning, and collaboration.
For the past two years City Tech’s OpenLab team has partnered with the Commons In A Box team, based at The Graduate Center, CUNY, to create a new teaching-focused version of their Commons In A Box community-building software that’s modeled on City Tech’s OpenLab.
Because the software is freely available, faculty members, departments, and entire institutions anywhere in the world will be able to create and customize their own OpenLabs!
This exciting development would not be possible without the contributions of our 27,000 OpenLab members over the past seven years. The OpenLab is a community-focused and community-driven platform, and it is so successful because of our community. So a big thank you to each and every one of the OpenLab’s members.
On September 18, 2019 we released version 1.7.24 of the OpenLab. It was a small release, with two small functionality improvements, and a few small bug fixes.
In this release, the Navigation Menu widget functionally was changed slightly so menu that appears in the widget no longer includes the Group Profile and Home links by default, without a way to remove them. This should be helpful for anyone who wishes to use a menu in the sidebar for sites with more complex navigation structures.
The unsubscribe links that appear at the bottom of email notifications were changed slightly to improve consistency across different types of emails.
Some of our members may have noticed that the “Log in” and “Sign up” text was not formatted properly in the top menu on some parts of the site, but this has now been fixed.
On August 15, version 1.7.23 of the OpenLab was released. It included updates for all themes and plugins, as well as for WordPress and BuddyPress, the software that powers the OpenLab. The release also included a few new features and plugins.
New Features
1. One of the new features included in this release is a change to course cloning functionality, called “shared cloning.” This feature can be enabled to allow other faculty to clone a course that is designated as available for shared cloning. This functionality will likely be especially useful for sites like Open Educational Resources (OER) and course coordination sites, but, it can be activated on any course site.
Once enabled, other faculty will be able to clone the course, creating an exact copy of the existing course, including all content created or uploaded by the course admin, which can be reused, remixed, transformed in the new version. Cloned versions of the course will include a list of credits on the course profile and in the site sidebar with attribution to any of the original courses. If the original course was itself a clone of another faculty member’s course, that course, as well as all previous iterations, would be included in the credits list as well.
2. Another new feature is the addition of an OER badge, which appears on the avatar of a course or project designated as an OER. Courses and projects with an OER badge can also be searched for in course and project directories. You can read more about OER badges [https://openlab.citytech.cuny.edu/blog/help/oer-badge/] in our help section.
3. OpenLab members can now use “@” mentions in a few places around the site. In the four places listed below, when you type the “@” symbol and then begin typing another member’s display name or username, suggestions will appear after a moment:
1. When writing a private message
2. When writing a discussion topic or reply in a course, project, or club.
3. When writing a post on a site Dashboard
4. When writing a comment on a site
After published, the @-mention will link to the member’s profile, and in all cases except a private message, the person mentioned will receive an email notification.
2. TablePress provides a very robust but simple way to add tables to any post or page. It is mobile-friendly and allows anything from simple to more complex tables that can be sorted or filtered, or split into multiple pages.
Greetings from the OpenLab and congratulations to all on the closing of another successful academic year!
While our weekly “Spotlight” blog series will go on hiatus for the season, we wanted to remind you of the sites we featured this past year and encourage you to check them out if you haven’t already done so.
Spring 2018 Spotlight Posts
A 3 part series on Open Educational Resources (OERs):
In addition to reviewing these posts from this past year, you can find a full curated list of all sites that have been spotlighted in our *new* Spotlight Archive. This archive offers visitors 3 curated lists to help them sort through the posts:
For everyone (By type of site – course, project, club, portfolio)
The OpenLab Community Team will continue to offer email support over the summer – please contact us with questions or concerns.
We are also beginning to post our fall programming. August workshops for Faculty/Staff have been posted – RSVP & mark your calendars! We will be in touch as we get more events and workshops on our calendar.
On May 17, we released version 1.7.21 of the OpenLab. This was a small release, but it included a few new plugins. One is the premium version of the PDF Embedder plugin, which adds functionality that should be useful to many OpenLab members, including a download button for embedded PDFs, the ability to show active links in PDFs, and a better views on mobile. If you’re already using PDF Embedder, you can continue to use it, but in order to take advantage of the new features, you’ll need to deactivate it, and activate the premium version. It appears in the list of plugins on your site dashboard just below PDF Embedder, and is called PDF Embedder Premium. We also added a plugin called Easy Custom Sidebars, which allows you to show a different sidebars, on different pages of your site. This plugin replaces Dynamic Widgets, which had a similar functionality, but was more difficult to set up.
We released version 1.7.20 of the OpenLab on April 18, which included a few new features and a small bug fix. We added a new theme and new plugin. The theme is called OpenLab Twenty Sixteen. It’s a child theme of Twenty Sixteen, and is quite similar, with a just few tweaks. We got rid of the black border around the site, and decreased some of the margins around the content so there’s less white space. We also increased the size of the site title, and changed some of the heading styles. We changed bulleted and numbered lists so they’re indented. Activating the theme also automatically activates the new plugin, Breadcrumb NavXT, which adds breadcrumb links to pages, making it easier to navigate sites that might have many different pages, such as Open Educational Resource (OER) sites. The plugin may be deactivated if you don’t want to use breadcrumbs, or activated on sites that aren’t using the new theme.
In addition, the mobile version of the site was improved, so that when viewing Course, Project, Club, or Portfolio Profiles, the link to the associated Site is at the top rather than bottom of the page.
We fixed a bug that affected only sites with both the Ultimate Category Excluder and Category Sticky Post plugins activated at the same time. If the Category Excluder plugin was activated and being used to exclude any categories from the home page, then sticky posts would not be “stuck” at the top of the homepage.
We did a very small release on March 19. In version 1.7.19 of the OpenLab, we added a new Gradebook plugin we’ve been working on. It’s currently available only to our beta testers, but we hope to have it ready for the whole OpenLab community before the Fall semester!
We released version 1.7.18 of the OpenLab on February 16, which included a some new features and a few small bug fixes. We added prominent links on the homepage to our three in-house sites—The Open Road, The Buzz, and Open Pedagogy on the OpenLab—so that it’s easier to stay up to date with all things OpenLab!
Also included in the release were some changes to the text in email notifications, making it more clear that members can’t reply by email to OpenLab messages from other members, discussion forum posts, or site comments. We made a few adjustments to the default settings of the WP Accessibility plugin. Most settings will not be visible for anyone not using a screen reader, but some members may notice that links don’t open in a new tab. This is a best practice for both accessibility and usability, but it can be changed in Dashboard > Settings > WP Accessibility.
