Summer Series 2023-Part 3

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.