Welcome to the first installment of This Week In OpenLab! Here you’ll find updates on what’s new around our community, as well as ways to make the most of your OpenLab experience.
New Year, New Members, New Courses!
As the term begins, our OpenLab community is growing at a tremendous pace. We’ve gained more than 50 new members this week alone! If you’re keeping score at home, this means we now have 1,050 members and more than 210 courses, clubs and projects.
Second Year Fellows Seminar Begins
We’d especially like to welcome the Living Lab Second Year Fellows, a group of City Tech faculty who will spend the semester working in The General Education Seminar, part of the College’s Title V grant-funded initiative A Living Laboratory.
This seminar will concentrate on the second year of the student experience at our college, a critical year for students that focuses on collaborative assignments and projects, and associate degree capstones.
Last Friday, the Fellows had their first meeting, where they shared ideas, discussed teaching and reading, and had a (very wet) scavenger hunt. Though their project is for Second Year Fellow use only, you can follow their adventures here!
Associate Fellows
We would also like to welcome the more than thirty full-time and part-time faculty members who are joining the Living Lab as First Year Associate Fellows. The Associate Fellows will be participating in a series of workshops led by our wonderful First Year Fellows, who have spent the last year working on the first year student experience. You can follow their progress here.
The New Term: A Great Time to Update Your Club!
If you’re a club or project administrator, remember that the beginning of the term means a host of new OpenLab users and thus potential new members. We’ll have a more in-depth post on community-building soon, but in the meantime, please try these simple ways to get and keep members of any project:
- create new comments and posts on your site and discussion forum–nothing indicates activity like new content! Aim to post at least once a week, as we’re doing here at This Week in OpenLab.
- make sure that your club or project profile page shows the name of and a way to contact the administrator of your club or project.
- contact OpenLab members to invite them to join. You can do that on the club or project profile page, and then ‘send invites’ using the right hand navigation.
The Open Road
Check out the first of our tutorials here. This one is on the KB Gradebook, which is a great plug-in which allows faculty to create a spreadsheet for students to privately access their grades. If you have questions about anything you see on this page, or would like to suggest an upcoming tutorial, please contact us here.
And as always, please join The Open Road to get “This Week in OpenLab” updates via email!
