[Charlie Edwards]

Thanks, Syelle! Bree is taking a well-deserved break this week, but we will put our heads together on this when she gets back. 🙂

[Charlie Edwards]

Hi Mary,

So sorry for the delay in getting back to you on this one! We had a little discussion about it with members of the OpenLab’s Community team. This is definitely an interesting question and approach!

The consensus within the group over here was that they have indeed evolved their course sites over time, though not perhaps to the extent you describe – for instance, making things more prominent as they are needed, then filing them away (so to speak) after that part of the course is done. We recommend using categories, as this makes it much easier to move things around – and, obviously, ensuring students understand what’s happening to avoid confusion! 🙂

We have also seen people work with their students on building out sites as a course project – one great early example, unfortunately no longer live, was a student-developed guide to City Tech and the local environment. They built it privately then did a big reveal with a launch party!

But we couldn’t think of anyone doing exactly what you’re talking about – do let us know how it’s going! 🙂 BTW, this is exactly the kind of thing we imagine people being able to discuss on the Community Hub, so we’re looking forward to getting started on building that…

Charlie

[Charlie Edwards]

Thanks so much, Mary – something in the new year would definitely be easier to wrangle. We would love to hear from you and Stephon – and are so happy to hear that you and your colleagues are enjoying using the OpenLab!!

[Charlie Edwards]

Hi all,

Thanks for this discussion! As we mentioned in the other thread the City Tech OpenLab’s Help relies on customizations that don’t exist in CBOX OpenLab. (Unfortunately, creation of member-facing help was out of scope when CBOX OpenLab was developed.)

We really like Ed’s approach of using a standalone site with a knowledge base theme, and we’d like to pursue something like this for CBOX OpenLab. Fortunately, we have just received our award letter (today!) for the CUNY OER funds I mentioned in the other thread. This will allow us to do two main things: a) create a site export/import tool so we can share content across installations and b) build a Community Hub for CBOX OpenLab – i.e. a CBOX OpenLab for CBOX OpenLab-ies such as you! 🙂 The idea is to create a more robust community space where people can share their experiences, discuss best practice uses, try out new features, and collaborate on projects.

We are now thinking to put these two things together to tackle Help – i.e. build out a Help site following Ed’s approach on the Community Hub (if you are willing, perhaps even with your help!). We would then be able to export that site as a nice package so that others can import it and tailor it for use in their own OpenLabs.

Of course, the above solution relies on work we haven’t yet done, so it will take some time to put in place – i.e. it doesn’t help you right now. So, in the meantime, it seems like a great idea to have a conversation about the most productive way for you to move forward (plus this larger project). We would obviously love to be part of the discussion!! The only issue is that the calendar isn’t our friend: next week is tricky and the following week is right before the holidays, so not sure what everyone’s availability will be?

Charlie

[Charlie Edwards]

Hi Mary – that’s such a great use for the OpenLab! It would be awesome to have something like that at City Tech too! On our OpenLab we have a couple of things that go in that direction, but nothing as robust as you describe. We know, though, that some faculty definitely use the OpenLab as a resource when advising students, since they can show students any open courses in their discipline.

Anyway, here are things that came to mind off the top of our heads (there may be others):

The English department’s Literature Committee (https://openlab.citytech.cuny.edu/literature/) has a site that lists all the course offerings, in some cases including links to faculty profiles on the OpenLab, along with other literature-related initiatives. In the past, when there’s been a special topics course or other course that needs advertising, they’ve made posters that are shared via email, print, and on this site too.

The Math department has an OpenLab site (https://openlab.citytech.cuny.edu/mathematics-department/) that includes links to “Course Hubs” for some courses – these were created by a group of faculty as part of an initiative we ran this summer and are designed to provide information about individual courses for students and faculty. The course hubs are used with “Model Courses”: these were also created by faculty as part of this summer’s initiative and are designed for colleagues to clone and use with their students.

The follow sites are faculty-facing, but perhaps still interesting: the Communication Design department is building a pedagogy site (https://openlab.citytech.cuny.edu/comd-pedagogy/) – it includes a list of courses, some of which have model courses associated with them. The English First Year Writing program also developed a single course hub for faculty (https://openlab.citytech.cuny.edu/fyw-pedagogy/), along with model courses.

Hope some of this is remotely relevant! 🙂 Happy to discuss more any time!
Charlie

[Charlie Edwards]

It was great to meet you all – thanks again for inviting us! And this is very helpful – thanks, Ed! We’ll take you up on this offer when we start working on this feature. 🙂

[Charlie Edwards]

That’s so great to hear, Paul! We’re excited that you’re excited and are really looking forward to the conversation.

[Charlie Edwards]

Excellent – we’d be delighted to do this! Let’s shift to email to sort out the logistics!

[Charlie Edwards]

Thanks, Ed, for sharing this. Boone may have further words of wisdom around releases, but just to say that, if it would be helpful, we would be glad to meet with you and Amanda to hear more about what you’re doing, and share our experiences with the OpenLabs at City Tech (original OpenLab) and BMCC (https://openlab.bmcc.cuny.edu/; uses CBOX OpenLab). But no pressure at all, of course! 🙂 (email: cedwards@citytech.cuny.edu)

[Charlie Edwards]

And thanks, Ed – we’ll take a look!

[Charlie Edwards]

Hi Ed – a belated note to say hi and that we’re delighted to have you here – you’ve definitely surfaced some bugs, to the benefit of others. So please don’t hold back! 🙂

Re the OpenLab for Students (https://openlab.citytech.cuny.edu/openlabforstudents/), we just created it – along with Teaching with the OpenLab for faculty (https://openlab.citytech.cuny.edu/teachingwithopenlab/) – in response to the pandemic, but are kicking ourselves for not doing this sooner! 🙂 We built them both as standalone sites as they’re being integrated into programs run by other teams at the college (e.g. student orientation), so a modular approach seemed like the right way to go.

Our Help on the City Tech OpenLab has accreted over many years and we are aiming to do some reorganization (hopefully this year, though with everything that’s going on it’s hard to commit to a timeline). It’s also on our list to come up with a more robust Help solution for CBOX OpenLab.

In the meantime, of course, you’re very welcome to leverage anything we’ve created. Bear in mind that, while they’re very similar, there are some differences between the City Tech OpenLab and CBOX OpenLab.

The City Tech OpenLab’s Help does use some custom functionality, as you’ll have seen. Bree can give you more details about the plugins we’re using, and we’re happy to answer any other questions you may have.

Finally, you might also be interested to know that we just heard CBOX OpenLab will be receiving funds from the CUNY-wide OER initiative enabling us to create a WP plugin that will allow members to export any site for others to import into their own installation, and vice versa. (This is necessary because the existing WordPress exporter doesn’t include images and other uploaded files, but instead downloads them from the source at the time of import; because of group privacy and other settings we need everything to be bundled into a zip.) This will make it much easier for people to share content across WP installations.

[Charlie Edwards]

Hi all – just a quick note to say thanks so much for reporting these issues. The team will obviously need to look into this, so please do provide as much info as you can!

– Charlie (Edwards; CBOX OpenLab Co-Project Director, in case we haven’t met before)

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