Monday, August 24

Today is Monday of WEEK 1 of class. Go to the website for your course, and then click on the link that says "Week 1 Orientation." That is where you will find the list of assignments that are due this week, including the assignments that are due tomorrow, Tuesday. Please get to work on those assignments now!Class announcements. There will be class announcements like these every day, Monday through Friday. You can see the announcements each day at the course website, in Desire2Learn, or at the Ning. For previous announcements, visit the announcements blog. You can also subscribe to the announcements by email!

Desire2Learn. After you log on to Desire2Learn (learn.ou.edu) and access this class, you will use the Quizzes and Declaration link to get to the quizzes and declarations. To check on your grade, click on the Gradebook link, and you should see your TOTAL POINTS displayed at the very top. As you take the quizzes and complete the declarations, points will be added to your total. If you do not see your Total Points listed at the top of the Gradebook, please let me know! Sometimes I have to do a little adjustment to make sure the Total Points are displayed.

Ning.com. For blogging and discussion, you will be using a Ning.com discussion board (oumyth.ning.com). This is a private discussion board for members of these classes only. You should have received an invitation to join the discussion board; contact me if you cannot find your email invitation. After you log on to the discussion board, you can update your Profile and adjust your settings . I hope you will enjoy using the Ning!

Working ahead. I would strongly recommend that you work ahead in this class, instead of doing your work on the day that it is due. If you can work just a day or two ahead of the deadlines, you will find the workload for this class much easier to manage. A few people in class are already working on the Week 4 assignments: WOW!

Contact me if you have questions. For many of you, this may be your first online class, and you may have a lot of questions as you get started. I hope the information that I've provided at the course website will answer most of those questions - but if something is not clear to you, or even if you are just curious about something, please send me an email!

Ganesha Chaturthi. The festival of Ganesha Chaturthi in honor of the elephant-headed god is being celebrated right now... and as Ganesha is the god of good luck and of the beginnings of things, I thought it would be nice to include him in today's announcements. You can see some pictures from this year's celebration of Ganesha Chaturthi here at the BBC website, and you can learn more about Ganesha at this Wikipedia article, which is also the source for this image of a statue of the god: