What is the OpenLab?
The OpenLab is University of New Haven’s open online community. It’s designed to support teaching, learning, and collaboration, and can be used by everyone at the university.
Open: Unlike traditional closed teaching platforms, the OpenLab allows members to share their work across the university and with the world.
Lab: The OpenLab provides a virtual space where students, faculty, staff, and students can work together, experiment, and innovate.
What can you use it for?
Courses: The OpenLab is used in many courses across multiple disciplines. Faculty use the OpenLab as an alternative or supplement to a Learning Management System to share materials, hold discussions, collect assignments, grade coursework, and more.
Projects: It also supports projects, such as student research projects, committees, grant-funded initiatives, departmental working groups, and more.
Portfolios: Anyone–students, faculty, and staff–can create a portfolio to showcase their work.
Why use the OpenLab?
It’s open: Unlike traditional closed platforms, faculty and students can share their work with peers beyond the classroom and across the disciplines (there are also robust privacy settings). Faculty can share their pedagogies with colleagues and learn best practices from others. It makes the work of the university visible and accessible.
It’s flexible: Instead of being one-size-fits-all, it offers a rich set of tools that you can customize to meet your needs and use in creative and innovative ways.
It’s useful: The OpenLab runs on WordPress, an open source publishing platform that powers over 35% of sites on the internet; using it builds proficiency with digital media and equips students with important transferable skills.
It’s yours: The OpenLab has been built using free and open source software (not proprietary tools) by University of New Haven faculty, staff, and students. OpenLab members choose how to use the site, control the materials they post there, and can take them when they leave. Development of the site is driven by the community’s needs, not commercial considerations.
It’s a community: You can use it to connect with others in the university community.
This article is adapted from City Tech OpenLab Help, under a CC BY-NC-SA license.
