What You're Doing, Where We're Going
Pageviews (for past quarter):
766,732
Average visit duration (for past quarter):
4:53
Number of users broken down by students, faculty, staff:
Students: 14,233
Faculty: 646
Staff: 123
Number of courses, projects, clubs, portfolios:
Courses: 1,133
Projects: 1,583
Clubs: 75
Portfolios: 3,580
“In the Spotlight,” housed on the Open Road, is a blog series that aims to showcase all the amazing work our students, faculty and staff are doing by featuring a different course, project, club or ePortfolio each week. Specifically, we highlight the unique ways users are designing their sites to meet their teaching, learning, professional, and/or extracurricular needs. Taken together, this collection of sites is a testament to the expansiveness of the OpenLab community and the diverse ways members are using the platform.
In addition to continuing this tradition this semester, we’re also introducing a new feature called “People’s Choice.” People’s Choice calls on all users and visitors of the OpenLab to recommend sites they feel are particularly successful and exemplify the excellence we promote here, “In the Spotlight,” on the Openlab. So start exploring all of the amazing sites on the OpenLab, and use this form to let us know what you like and why!
We look forward to hearing from you soon about which sites are your favorites!
We released version 1.7.4 of the OpenLab on October 18. In this release, we added a password strength notification on the sign up page. In addition, we retired KB Gradebook, a plugin that is no longer being updated. We’re testing out a few options for a potential replacement, so stay tuned. Other than those two items, it was another small release, with a few additional behind the scenes updates and ongoing accessibility improvements.
This week we, the OpenLab team, are proud to announce OpenLab is now home to over 19,000 members! Thank you for joining us!
Given our growing community, we’d like to take a minute to remind you of all of the services available to you:
Join the Open Road today for up-to-date news about the OpenLab and information about our workshops and events. Also visit “In the Spotlight” Here, we showcase the excellence and innovation of particularly well-done sites, which may spark ideas for other users about their own sites. We may even feature your site! This fall we are introducing a new feature, “People’s Choice”, offering an opportunity for members to recommend sites for recognitions — Stay tuned for more details!
We look forward to working with you,
The OpenLab Team
The Buzz is hiring! We are an Openlab student project dedicated to all things City Tech, where students blog about themselves and/or topics of their choice. We seek enthusiastic student bloggers to join The Buzz and create conversation, community, and engagement on the OpenLab and strengthen the intellectual and social life of the college community.
Contact us at openlab@citytech.cuny.edu & jbelli@citytech.cuny.edu if you’re interested. See the full call below and submit the complete application by Monday, October 10th at 12 pm. Interviews will be conducted shortly after.
We released version 1.7.3 of the OpenLab on September 20. It was a small release, coming on the heels of some significant changes over the summer, which you can read more about here. It included some improvements to the way error messages are displayed during the sign up process for OpenLab accounts, made a few fixes to the way our WP Grade Comments plugin displayed in the newly-added theme Hemingway, and also included a few behind the scenes updates that won’t be noticeable to users.
(Image: Stefan Schweihofer)
Image: opensource.com
Open Pedagogy on the OpenLab is a forum where our community can ask questions, stimulate discussion, and access/share resources related to teaching and learning on the OpenLab. This site is a good place to find ideas for digital pedagogy assignments, access information on best practices and tips for open digital pedagogy, and engage other faculty members in discussions about what open pedagogy is and what shape it can take in our classrooms at City Tech. With this in mind, faculty members are encouraged to join and contribute to the site, to help expand the available resources and generate further the discussion. If you join, you will also receive notifications when new content is added or discussion is happening on the site.
In addition to this site, the OpenLab also hosts a series of Open Pedagogy events each semester. Our first event for the Fall of 2016, held in conjunction with the Library, will focus on open educational resources (OERs) at City Tech. In addition to deconstructing the term “OER,” we will hear from several City Tech faculty on OERs they have developed. Â Refreshments will be served (thanks to the Faculty commons for its generous support of this event!) and part-time faculty are eligible to receive a stipend for participation. Â Visit the event posting for more information and to RSVP! We hope to see you there!
(Image: Unsplash.com)
Welcome back to campus! We hope that you had a fun and restful summer. While you were on break, the OpenLab Team was hard at work making improvements to the site. Here is a brief overview of some of the new additions to the OpenLab:
Have questions about any of these updates? Got a request for another? Let us know at OpenLab@citytech.cuny.edu. We’re excited to hear from you!
You may have noticed that the OpenLab experienced some slowness and even some downtime on Monday and Tuesday of last week, as well as this morning. Our Team immediately went to work to track down the issue and put a fix into place. We’re happy to report that the issue has been resolved and that the OpenLab is running smoothly once again.
We apologize for any frustrations or complications that arose as a result of this slowdown. We, the OpenLab Team, pride ourselves on the reliability, power, and performance of the site. When problems pop up, we work as hard as we can to address them quickly and to learn from them so that they don’t happen again.
As always, if you have any problems or concerns about the OpenLab, please contact us at OpenLab@citytech.cuny.edu. We’re here for you.
***
In the spirit of openness, we have included below the more technical details of what happened for those who are interested.
The action centered around the new “What’s happening on the OpenLab?” widget that we just introduced. We tend to roll out new features like this one during the summer, when use and the potential for disruption are at their lowest. The widget shows the ten most recent activity items that are public and are associated with a club, course, project, or portfolio.
A late-breaking issue arising from activity with future timestamps forced us to make the database query used for the widget more complex than originally intended. Unfortunately, the new query couldn’t be stress tested with the level of traffic that the OpenLab receives during the semester. The database table against which the query was being run has over two hundred thousand entries, and it hadn’t been optimized for the kind of complicated query we were throwing at it. Faculty, students, and staff returning for the Fall semester were visiting the site more and more frequently, and the widget was being loaded many times every minute. The requests started queueing for system resources, until the site ground to a halt.
It took a few days of back and forth between members of our Community and Management Teams, our developers, and the folks who manage the servers to figure out that this particular query was the bottleneck. Once we’d tracked it down, we needed a fix. In the long run, we’ll try to optimize this query to be inherently faster. But in the short run, we can work around its complexity by ensuring that it’s run infrequently. So now, when you load the “What’s Happening on the OpenLab?” widget, you’re seeing the results of a query that’s been cached, or stored away for a certain period of time, and is reused for multiple requests.
Welcome back faculty, staff, and students! We missed you this summer! Whether you’re returning to the OpenLab or signing up for the first time, remember to join the Open Road. The project is the one-stop-shop for the OpenLab’s Community Team. Here we keep you, our users, up to date on all the site’s goings-on, including news and updates. Check back here to find our office hours, workshops for students, or workshops faculty and staff. See our OpenLab calendar for all OpenLab events. And of course don’t forget about our Spotlight posts, where we highlight excellence and innovation on the OpenLab each week.
While you’re at it, don’t forget to join The Buzz, too, our student-run site!
As always, the OpenLab Community Team is here for you. Contact us online or at OpenLab@citytech.cuny.edu.
The OpenLab is an open-source, digital platform designed to support teaching and learning at City Tech (New York City College of Technology), and to promote student and faculty engagement in the intellectual and social life of the college community.
