Courses

If you’re looking for help cloning your own course, you can review our help document on Cloning a Course. Shared cloning is a separate functionality that can be enabled to allow other faculty to clone your course.

Once enabled, other faculty will be able to clone your course, creating an exact copy of an existing course, keeping all content you created or uploaded, allowing them to reuse, remix, transform, and build upon the material in this course. Cloned versions of the course will include a list of credits on the Course Profile and in the Site sidebar with attribution to you and your course. If you created this Course as a clone of another faculty member’s Course, that Course and the Course’s author, as well as all previous iterations, will be included in the credits list as well.

In addition, only content created by the admin will be cloned, so any posts, media, docs, or discussion content created by students will not be cloned. The course avatar, course settings, and site settings will all remain the same, although you can change anything as necessary.

Enabling shared cloning of your Course

1. For an existing course, go to the Profile of the Course for which you want to enable shared cloning. Choose Settings in the right-hand menu and then Settings again. Check the box “Enabled shared cloning.”

You can also enable shared cloning when you create a new course.  You will find the “Enable shared cloning” box beneath the Course Description.

Existing course settings:

New course creation:

2. Once enabled, other faculty will be able to clone your course, allowing them to reuse, remix, transform, and build upon the material in this course. Cloned versions of the course will include attribution to original course authors and courses in a list of “Acknowledgements” on the Course Profile and in the Site sidebar, as well as the number of times the course has been cloned.

Cloning a Course with Shared Cloning

1. You can clone a course that has enabled shared cloning from either the Course Profile or Site. To begin cloning, be sure you’re logged in to the OpenLab, and go to the Course Profile or Site of the Course you would like to clone.

2. Click the button labelled Clone this Course beneath the avatar on the Course Profile. Or, if you’re on the Course Site, you can click the Clone this Course link in the sidebar on the Course Site.

Step One: Profile

1. On the first Create/Clone a Course screen, choose Clone an Existing Course and then in the dropdown menu, select the course you would like to clone.

2. By default, the author of all materials copied to the new course will be switched to you. If you’d like the admin of the original course to remain the author of these materials, uncheck the box that reads “switch author to cloner (recommended)”.

3.  Enter the Course Name.

4. You’ll notice that the description is already filled in, and is the same as the course you are cloning. The School, Department, Course Code, and Section Code are also pre-populated.  You can leave these as they appear or edit.

If you are co-teaching the course, you can add additional faculty in the Faculty section by typing the name in the box, and selecting the name from the dropdown list that appears.  This will add them to the course profile so they are listed as instructors.  Please note: To become admins for this course, these additional instructors must also join the course and be promoted to admin.

5. Enter the Semester and Year.

6. Choose the site details.  The button for “Name your cloned site” will be pre-selected.  Fill in the URL for the new site.  Please note: the site address must be different from the old site, which will be displayed below.  You should also only include the last part of the URL (do not include https://openlab.citytech.cuny.edu/).

• It is a good practice to add Semester and Year to differentiate between your courses from one semester to another: FacultyLastNameCourseCodeSemYear.  For example: smithadv1100sp2012
• If you teach multiple sections and plan to create additional course sites on the OpenLab, consider adding other identifying information to the URL, such as the section number or days of the week (for example, MW or TuTh).

6. When you are finished, click Create Course and Continue.

Step 2: Privacy Settings

The privacy settings for the new course will be set to public by default, but you may change them if you wish.

1. Choose your Profile privacy settings.  These settings control the privacy of the course profile, and are different from the course site, which you will choose next. You can change the settings at any time.

This is a public course:

• The course profile and related content and activity will be visible to the public, whether or not they are members of the OpenLab.
• The course profile will be listed in the OpenLab course directory and search results.
• Any OpenLab member may join this course.
• Even if you want your course to be private, you might want to choose this option for the first few weeks of the semester because it is easier for students to join.

This is a private course:

• The course profile and related content and activity will only be visible to members of the course.
• The course profile will be listed in the course directory and search results.
• Only OpenLab members who request membership and are accepted by the professor may join this course.

This is a hidden course:

• The course profile, related content, and activity will only be visible only to members of the course.
• The course profile will NOT be listed in the course directory and search results.
• Only OpenLab members who are invited may join this course.

2. Next, choose the privacy settings for your course site.

Public:

Allow search engines to index this site:

• Anyone can visit your site without needing a password.
• Search engines will index all pages and posts, meaning your site will show up in search results on Google, Bing and others.
• Choose this option for maximum public visibility.

Ask search engines not to index this site:

• Visitors do not need a password to see your site if they know the URL or are linked from elsewhere, but Google, Bing and other search engines should not index your posts and pages. (Please note: it is up to search engines to honor your request.)
• Choose this option if you want to be able to show the blog to people who are not members of the OpenLab, but you don’t want people to stumble upon it via search engines.

Private:

I would like my site to be visible only to registered users of City Tech OpenLab:

• Anyone who is signed into the OpenLab can see this site.
• Choose this option if you’d only like the OpenLab community to be able to see the site.

I would like my site to be visible to registered users of this Course:

• Only members of your course will be able to visit the site.
• Choose this option if you only want enrolled students to be able to see the site.

Hidden:

I would like my site to be visible only to site administrators:

• No one except site admins (only the professor, unless you add others) can see the site.
• You may choose this option if you are in the process of creating your course site, but it would rarely be useful during an active course.

3. The member role settings will also be pre-populated with the usual default values for new courses. You can leave them as is, adjust them, or edit them later.

4. When you’re done, click Next Step.

Step 3: Course Avatar

1. Upload an avatar that reflects the subject or topic of your course.   If you have an image file ready that you would like to use as your avatar, click Browse or Choose File.  Select the file you want to use from your computer or flash drive and then click Upload Image.  If you don’t have an image you would like to use you can always add one later–just click Next Step (if you are finished skip to the next section, “Step Four: Invite Members”).

Step Four: Inviting Members

1. If you would like to invite members to your Course, start typing their display name.  When a dropdown list appears, select their name from the list.  Their name and avatar will appear under the heading Invites.  When you’re finished, or if you do not wish to invite anyone at this time (you can always do it later!), click Finish, at the bottom of the page.

2. After you click Finish your course will be cloned, and you will be on the Course Profile page of your new course!  Once the course is cloned, you will be the admin of the new cloned course, and the faculty member(s) who contributed previous versions of the course will be listed on the Acknowledgements line on the Course Profile and in the Site widget in the sidebar.

From here, you can (a) change settings such as privacy, Course description, or (b) change your avatar.  From your Course Profile you can also access your (c) Course Site and Dashboard (the admin panel, where you will edit and add content to your Course Site).

Please note:

• All posts and pages the previous admin created on the previous course site will have been cloned, and published on the new site. You can review and move any to draft, as necessary.
• If the previous admin had a custom menu it will be activated on the new site, but this can be edited at any time.
• Any posts created in the Discussion forum, Docs, or Files the previous admin uploaded will appear in the new course. You can keep these or delete any as necessary.
• The site theme and header image will remain the same, although you may change these at any time.  In addition, any plugins or widgets activated on the old site will appear on the new site.
• Content created by former admins who have left the group before the time of cloning won’t be copied to the cloned site.

Help information on course site privacy adapted from Blogs@Baruch at Baruch College, CUNY.