The Open Road

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

Greetings,

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.
  • Check out this great resource on Assignment Design for Teaching Online by the Baruch Center for Teaching and Learning.
  • Design a few more assignments for your semester.

• Decide how you will  collect student work:
  • First answer the following questions:
    • 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. 

If you want to review this or previous week’s tasks, visit the archive on The Open Road.

Cheers,

The OpenLab Community Team

See the full 5-part series on The Open Road.

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

Greetings,

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?

Cheers,

The OpenLab Community Team

See the full 5-part series on The Open Road.

Part 3 of 5: Create on the OpenLab

Greetings,

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!
    • Open Pedagogy on the OpenLab: A site for sharing and discussing resources about open digital pedagogy!
      

• Connect with your friends and join other groups related to your interests:
  
  • You can search through people, courses, projects, clubs, and portfolios using the menu at the top and the magnifying glass in the top-right.
  • If you are a student, you may want to join a club and introduce yourself online to its members. Some active clubs include the Prism Alliance, the City Tech Union for Differently Abled Learners, and the VR & AI Club.
  • 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.
  
  • Get familiar with the (new!) course template. Take a video tour of the template and read our help documentation.
  • 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.
  • Customize your site’s appearance:
    • You can choose a header image.
    • 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?