Last week, we announced the winners of the 4th Annual OU Creaties. These awards celebrate the best new websites built by OU Create users.

We had over a hundred nominees for the Creaties this year, spanning a fantastic variety of experiences and modalities. More than 40 of the nominees were faculty and staff, and we saw an array of great course sites and class projects.

Nick Lolordo produced a resource-rich site for his course, American Genius: Gertrude Stein and Modern Identity. Nick shared the course readings and viewings on the site making it a great open resource for anyone interested in Gertrude Stein. He also built in weekly blog updates for the students. This level of communication is, I think, more common in blended and online courses, so it’s great seeing it applied to a face-to-face class.

Landing page of American Genius, featuring both a painting and a photograph of Gertrude Stein.

I don’t normally think that much about the side-bar/widgets in modern web sites, but Nick put his to great use. The top section in the sidebar links to each of the students blogs, helping to integrate their work into a community around the course. The next three sections are filled with great resources, both for this particular course, and for expository writing courses more generally. The menu structure is similarly easy to use and full of fantastic resources.

Congratulations Nick and thank you for your fantastic work.

You can see more of the winners in this video and in our series of posts on the winners: