This Week in The OpenLab: September 16th Edition

NEW TERM=NEW MEMBERS!

 (Image by James Cridland via Creative Commons License)

The start of the term always brings an explosion of new membership, and this term was no different.  Our community now has more than 7,000 members, and more than 6,500 of them are students!  Roughly 800 students joined since the end of August.  Welcome, to all of you who joined us in the last couple of weeks.

________________

TROUBLE REGISTERING? 

As some of you may have noticed, a small issue has cropped up with registering for the OpenLab, having to do with student City Tech email accounts (and only student accounts). The Open Lab is not connected to the City Tech email system, and we’re working with City Tech to ameliorate the problem, but in the meantime, we have a solution.

The Problem:  When you sign up to join the OpenLab, the system sends you an email to your City Tech email account, which verifies that you are a City Tech student. Occasionally (not all the time) students click on that email and receive and error message, and are thus unable to complete sign up.

The SOLUTION!:  Instead of clicking the activation link in the email, you can copy and paste it directly into the URL field (the address bar at the top of your browser).  It seems to work more effectively if you don’t right click to copy but instead use Control C and Control V to copy and paste.  Also, some students have reported that it worked to change browsers (Chrome to Firefox, for example).

And of course, if you don’t understand any of this, or this solution doesn’t seem to be working for you, please contact us anytime.

 _________________

FEATURED TUTORIAL: CLONING A COURSE

As we mentioned in our last post, we have created an easy way to copy a course, and so we’re releasing the “Clone a course” feature:  a simple, few-clicks way to recreate a course profile and site, carrying over all the information, pages, documents, posts, etc. We now have a new help page explaining how it works, and you can find that here!

And as always, email us if you have any questions.