Tuesday, June 3, 2008

Hi everyone! I hope you all survived your first day of summer session without me! I apologize for being out of town: I returned late last night and will be around for most of the remainder of the summer!

I see that many of you have started working on your assignments! That's great! Here are a few important things to keep in mind while you work:

1. Accessing the course website: Just as a reminder, you will be completing most of your assignments for this course in D2L. However, all of the assignment instructions, the course syllabus, and course policies can be found on the Contemporary Issues in Biology course website.

2. Course Announcements: If you haven't done so already, please select a method for receiving course announcements. You can either view them by visiting D2L or my blog everyday (you will probably be logging on to D2L almost every day anyway) or you can sign up to receive course announcements via email.

3. CAS Orientation: If you have not taken an online course through OU, you must complete the College of Arts and Sciences Online Course Orientation by this Friday OR YOU WILL BE DROPPED FROM THE COURSE. The orientation for Summer 2008 online courses is at http://learn.ou.edu/. Under your list of spring classes, click on "Online Orientation SU 08." Read the information on the home page, and then click on "Content" at the top of the page.

4. Course Orientation: You should start working on your Week 1 assignments for this course which are due Friday by 11:00 pm. One of these assignments includes responding to an email that I sent out yesterday entitled Course Orientation Email Confirmation. If you did not receive this email, check your junk mail or contact me ASAP (hgalbraith@ou.edu).

5. Assignment Instructions: I have sent out 3 reminders about this already, but it's worth repeating one more time: You MUST click on the link to each individual assignment to access the entire set of assignment instructions. Many of you have posted incomplete assignments on the discussion board. You will need to edit those before you can declare credit for them.

6. Semester Schedule: You should also take a look at the semester checksheet located under the Contents link on D2L. This is a helpful tool for figuring out all when your assignments are due.

I know it seems like there's a lot of stuff to do, but once you get in the swing of things, you should have no problems! Let me know if you have any questions!

Heather