This week, we spotlight the OpenLab Community Team’s very own Olivia Wood. Specifically, we take a look at Olivia Wood’s OpenLab Teaching Portfolio, which offers an example of a compelling and clean site design that allows her to communicate her identity as  an instructor clearly and succinctly.

To begin, we note that the OpenLab offers all faculty and staff the possibility of creating a digital portfolio. Portfolios can be used to showcase any type of work, whether it be research, teaching or service accomplishments. 

Olivia has used the portfolio space to highlight her teaching, painting a robust picture of herself as an instructor without overwhelming her reader with too much detail. For example, her Home page features her statement of teaching philosophy, introducing readers to her general values as an educator. 

Her perspectives on teaching are then demonstrated concretely through separate pages that feature (in order on her main menu): courses taught, annotated assignments, examples of student work and observations and evaluations. There are two things to note here. The first is that while Olivia could have featured multiple pages of work on each of these subjects, she smartly chooses to give excerpts to make the content more digestible. So, she links out to a full syllabus of course, giving just a paragraph overview in the actual courses taught page. And she gives summary statistics of her teaching evaluations rather than featuring the full multi-page evaluation documents.

Second, she protects the privacy of her students by making her student work page password-protected. This is a good reminder that 1) student consent is needed to post student work; 2) privacy settings can be set at the page or post level and just for the site as a whole. Instructions for altering privacy settings are here.

All in all, Olivia’ teaching portfolio offers a straightforward and compelling narrative of who she is and what she has done as an instructor. Check it out for inspiration!

This week, we spotlight the Faculty Publication Support Workshop Series OpenLab site. This is “a joint initiative of the Faculty Commons and the Library’s Scholarly Communications Committee” which “supports City Tech faculty in their scholarship and publishing.” Note how sleek the logo is– kudos to Faculty Commons Graphic Designer Savonne Andrews for the design!

The site uses the 2015 theme, which works very well here as the site functions primarily as a blog, with regular announcements posted to the Home page. If you are also using your site primarily as a one-way communication tool to other OpenLab members, this is a smart design. You can use posts to remind members of upcoming meetings and use a pinned post at the top of your feed to give an overview of your project’s goals. The Faculty Publication Support site’s pinned post, for example, notes that workshops are monthly, include guest speakers, and group discussions. 

We also like how the Workshop series links out to other pre-existing resources on publishing, such as the Library’s Resources for Academic Publishing. While it might seem counterintuitive, it is better to break up information into smaller chunks in this way. Here, the Publication Workshop Series site is reserved for information about the workshops themselves. Broader resources on publication are kept separate, which helps avoid confusion about where to go for what information.

We also like that the Workshop Series makes materials for the actual meetings available on their OpenLab site. They link out to the page with a Meeting Schedule in their main menu. On this page, an overview for each meeting is given and materials used (for example, slide decks, recordings of the session, etc.) are posted. This is a best practice to carry over to your OpenLab courses as well, even if you post your materials elsewhere, or email them to participants. It is good to have these things in multiple places. How many of us have gone back to an organization or class’ website after a meeting only to find that the recording we needed isn’t there! Making your site a living repository of workshop/ course materials makes everyone’s life so much easier!

Please take a look at the Faculty Publication Support Workshop Series OpenLab site. It is a great model for projects, clubs, and courses!