The Open Road

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.