CUNY Academic Commons

Hi all,

I was in a Guttman class this morning to help register students. Many students were registering using their phones and several problems became apparent. In an intro email from the professor, students were given a link to the public course site. They clicked the link to their public course site and then tried to find the register page. Issues:

1. If viewing a public site and you click "log in", it appears that only already registered users can log in. You cannot register from there or click a link to go to register. Can we add a link to registration here?

2. Most sites do not build a way to get to the commons home page. This means there is no way to get to the commons homepage and registration from most sites. To complicate things, the logo in the footer (on mobile) does not lead you to the commons home page. If you click another link in the footer, you get to the main commons pages, but not the home page. And again, the logo does not link to the commons home page where the registration link is so you are can reach various commons pages but never the home page.

On mobile the commons logo appears in various places but never seems to link to the home page. Several students were stuck in a constant loop of commons pages but could never get to the home page to click register. Screenshot example. We got around this by going to the help section, where the logo does lead to the homepage.

Maybe this was an outcome of the accessibility audit and redundant links but I think it is important to make it easier to navigate to the registration page and make the commons logo universally link to the home page. This function might become especially important in upcoming days if professors begin shifting aspects of their course online and ask students to register for the Commons.