In this installment, we build on Part 1 and Part 2 to 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, tasks involving building courses below are for instructors and focus on the first steps of course creation, taking a particularly close look at the course template. The steps involved could also guide you through creating a project, club, or portfolio as well!
Get Ready
Make some connections by browsing through courses, projects, and clubs to join any that relate to your work here at City Tech. Start with joining the Open Road so you’ll get notifications when there are new posts! You can also find other members you know and invite them to connect with you–or at least browse to see how they’re using the OpenLab.
Get Set
Look to colleagues’ sites as mentor sites! For building a course site, find examples of the same course, other courses 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.
Go
To build your Fall 2025 course, decide if you’re going to create a course or clone a course. Even if you have never created a course before, you can clone one by taking advantage of what we call shared cloning, either to use a course that someone else has used and given permission for anyone else to use as a starting point, or to clone a model course for the course you’re teaching. That’s a course developed by colleagues in your department specifically for colleagues to clone and use. Then you can work to tailor your site instead of starting from scratch.
If you’re creating your course rather than cloning one, you’ll get to choose which template you want to use. Templates help you get started by pre-loading a menu and certain tools that we think are helpful when you’re using a site for your course. The two options currently available are a informational template, which is useful if you want your site to be a place where you share information with you students, or an interactive template, which is useful if you want your site to be a place where you and your students share information. Whichever you choose is really a starting place for the course you’re designing–for example, you can always add in discussion spaces even if you’ve chosen the informational template, etc.
Customize
Customize your course’s profile for your course community. The profile is like a portal for the course, displaying an avatar (if you don’t have an image, find a reusable images online), course description, list of members, and access to some tools including Announcements, plus a link to the Course Site. Choose a privacy setting for the profile and site in the profile settings.
Even more exciting is customizing your course’s site–that’s a WordPress website. Consult OpenLab Help to learn more about how accessibility can guide your site-building to make your site work well for everyone in your community. Set your site apart by adding a header image by choosing an image of your own creation or one that is in the public domain or has a Creative Commons license. 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 Part 4, we’ll think about the next steps in building a course.
Photo Credit: Photo by Javon Swaby via Pexels using a CC0 license.