All Ryerson University students, staff and instructors have access to the blog system, provided they have an active my.ryerson username and password. If you haven’t yet activated a my.ryerson account, please do so at http://www.ryerson.ca/accounts.

Blog Request Form

Ryerson faculty, staff and students can request blogs for teaching, learning and research purposes. These blogs must be ‘Ryerson-related’ and cannot be used for commercial purposes or to collect money.

To get a blog on our system, you will have to submit a request form. You will be contacted by email once your blog has been set up.

*Please Note: we can only add user accounts to the system, so we cannot add a group email username as a user to your blog (i.e. if you have a non-person email account like cars@ryerson.ca, we cannot add ‘cars’ as a user or as the administrator of your blog).

If this blog is for a course, the blog prefix will be based on the course code and term. Blog prefix selection is not available for course blogs.

PROBLEM ACCESSING THE BLOG REQUEST FORM?

The form requires you to be logged in to only your Ryerson Google account. If you also have a non-Ryerson Google account, you may not be able to access the form. If you have trouble accessing the form, please either log out from your non-Ryerson Google account, or use a private or incognito browser option to access the form. Please do not click Request Access.

How long can I keep my Ryerson blog?

Course Blogs will be archived once the course has ended, but will remain on the system for 1 year after the end of the term, as per Ryerson’s course retention policies. After this time, they will be permanently deleted, without notice.

All other blogs are monitored, and will be removed after 1 year of inactivity (so make sure you update regularly!). Blogs will be removed on an ongoing basis, and without notice.

Course Blog Archiving Schedule

• Winter term blogs – archiving begins in June.
• Spring/Summer term blogs – archiving begins in October.
  
• Fall term blogs – archiving begins in February.

Course Blogs: Syllabus

There are a few things that you will need to include in your course syllabus, if you plan to use a blog for your course.

Don’t assume that the students fully understand the implications of posting to the course blog — it needs to be expressly stated in the syllabus.

Here are a few items to include in that statement:

• Who will be able to see the posts? (Just the Instructor/TA? The whole class? The public?)
• How long will the content be available? By default, course blogs are archived soon after the term has completed. If you need the blog to exist for longer than the term, you need to include that information in your course syllabus AND in your request, when you request the blog initially.
• Will the content be used in any other context? The assumption being that this content will only be viewed in this blog for the purpose of completing course activities. If you intend to copy the content elsewhere or use it in another format, you must include the information in the syllabus.
• Students may opt out. While you don’t have to list the alternatives in the syllabus, it is important to let the students know that they can come to you if they are not comfortable having their work posted to the blog. Be sure to include a quick note to that effect in the syllabus.

What if these things were not included in the syllabus?

The assumption is that student work is only visible in this blog website, to the instructor, and will only be accessed during the term, unless otherwise stated in the syllabus.

If you later want to make the blog (and the students’ work) public, keep it available past the end of term, or use the work in another context, you will require written consent from each student.