When you register for T189, you’ll be sent the course materials as explained in a previous blog post and a letter giving you your Open University computer username and a password. My first piece of advice would be to log in to your OU Student homepage here:
Open University Student Homepage
and check when your course website opens.
Then, if you go down the page a little further, you’ll find a section entitled Your Links where there will be a clickable link to the Open University server you’ve been allocated to for your course. T189’s home is on Server 2 along with the Science, Technology and Maths courses whereas Server 1 is the home of the Arts and Humanities courses.
If you click that link, you’ll go to the browser version of the relevant First Class Server showing your personal mailbox, the Practice Forum, and a few other general Open University conferences. Just before your course starts (the date will be shown on your StudentHome page) your course conference should suddenly pop into being on your desktop as a small icon. T189 has, of course, a small camera icon. My advice is to get in and say ‘hello’ because it’s amazing how keen OU students are to get off and running with a new course! If you need any practise at using First Class, drop into the Practice forum to post a message or two, reply, quote and so on to learn the ropes.
Thirdly, it’s a good idea to set up a T189 Bookmarks or Favourites folder in your browser where you can keep important web addresses like the course website, studenthome and any other websites that you find as you study. Quick instant access can save hunting for web addresses later. This can save your sanity further along in your course when you wonder where that really interesting website was that had such valuable information for your studies. Trust me – been there – done that!
Back to the conferences. Any conference with unread messages will display a red flag. If you read any messages that contain useful information, you can use File > Save to save a copy of the message on your hard disk for future reference. Create a folder for course conference messages so you can keep them neat and tidy – you will rue the day when you have to trawl back through hundreds of conference messages looking for that one with the golden nugget of information …
If you want to hear a reader’s feedback
, I rate this post for 4/5. Detailed info, but I just have to go to that damn yahoo to find the missed parts. Thank you, anyway!
Comment by Pirsey — April 22, 2009 @ 6:56 am |