Today’s my birthday and I couldn’t ask for a better work-related birthday present. I get the opportunity to announce that what was once a small pilot called OU Create, heavily modeled after the Domain of One’s Own project at the University of Mary Washington, is moving into full production. For the past year, our ability to serve everyone on campus was somewhat limited. While domains are still a relatively affordable solution, in order to serve a campus our size we are moving a “Subdomain of One’s Own” model. For free, all OU faculty, staff, and students can get a subdomain of oucreate.com or can individually purchase a domain for $12/yr, which is still the option I will be recommending to my students due to the full ownership and easy transferability.Just getting ready for the semester it’s been exciting to see the buzz on OU Create. Nathan Gerth at the Carl Albert Center has been an absolute machine. He’s had access to OU Create for all of two months and has created six sites including a course site, a virtual exhibit on model rockets , and a subject guides site to give visitors insight into the thematic overview of the Carl Albert Center Congressional Archives. Several lab groups, like this one led by Thomas Neeson, which studies the impacts of global change on freshwater ecosystems, have launched virtual spaces. Another faculty member, Bob Pavlik, has also been blogging at one of my favorite OU Create domain names: thearchitecturegarage.com. Last, I’m not exactly sure the details on this one, but a student is using OU Create to create a secret dinner society.
With all the OU Create goodness going on, I was excited to get to write the following email to faculty:
Dear Faculty,
Throughout the 2014-2015 academic year, the Center for Teaching Excellence led a pilot program, called OU Create, to provide faculty tools that would allow them to integrate the use of web domains and digital creation tools into class curriculum. Additionally, students, faculty, and staff were able to request a domain at create.ou.edu and build a web presence such as portfolios, blogs, wikis, course sites, research sites and more using easy-to-install applications such as WordPress.
The pilot gave 853 users the opportunity to collectively create 1051 websites, collectively write 7,800+ blog posts, and generate nearly two million words in blog posts. Further, it is a way for students to take their work with them beyond their tenure at OU.
Today I’m excited to let you know that, with the support of the Office of the Senior Vice President and Provost and OU Information Technology, OU Create is moving to full production and requests for use will no longer be required. Starting today, users can register a subdomain (yourname.oucreate.com) at no cost or purchase a top-level domain (yourdomain.com) for $12/year. This domain is registered directly to the user, owned by them, and transferable to any domain registrar at any point in time.
Because OU Create is now openly available to members of the OU community, OU IT will begin a process of decommissioning older web services. Students.ou.edu will be taken offline following the Fall 2015 semester and faculty-staff.ou.edu will be set to expire at the end of Summer 2016. All files maintained within these spaces that you wish to keep will need to be transferred to OU Create. While OU Create is available for individuals, all OU organizations and departments will continue support with OU Web Communications while student organizations will use OrgSync.
In order to facilitate this transition, as well as get you further information on how to utilize OU Create, we will be holding four workshops throughout the Fall:
Please leverage the workshops and the online documentation to answer questions or email the OU Create team at create@ou.edu.
Sincerely,
Adam Croom
