Welcome to Business 100 online. I’m Jack Morris, the Dean in the College of Business and Economics. You’ll see me in some of the online modules. I also teach in the Integrated Business curriculum and in Production and Operations Management in the Department of Business.

What we’d like to do today is to go through some of the fundamentals of using the online technology. This has been our college’s first effort at an online course. How many of you have taken an online course before? OK—a handful. Most people typically haven’t taken an online course before and we wanted a chance to make sure that we were able to communicate with you and you were able to ask questions about the Web site that hopefully will make the experience a better experience for you overall. So you have handouts of the PowerPoint slides that I’m going to go through, and I’m also going to be going through a demonstration on the Web site itself so we’ll do a lot of demonstration as well. If you have a question anywhere along the way, I want to make sure that you have a chance to ask those questions and when we’re done—and we’ll be done before the hour for sure—I will give you another opportunity to ask any questions you might have. Please ask those questions now, it’ll make your experience hopefully less frustrating and you will encounter fewer technical problems.

Let’s start with the Home page. The URL, for the Home page is listed on your slide, and if we go to that live, you see what the live web site looks like for Business 100. What we’re going to ask you to do initially, if you haven’t already done this, is to fill out some survey information. Have any of you had the chance to fill out the survey information? A few of you. Ok, let me show you the phases to that, that we’d like you to go through, and these are also on your PowerPoint slides. Let’s go through those on the slides first and then I’ll come back to the Web site.

Ok, first a bit about the course. The course, as you know or hopefully know, is graded pass/fail. The online course consists of 11 modules and you’ll see them labeled with titles. You will be required to finish all 11assignments. Refer to http://www.cbe.uidaho.edu/bus100/ for more information.  There’s an assignment in each of the modules and the assignments are really a part of the learning experience, they’re a part of the module. You’ll see that the reading is relatively brief in each of the modules. We have you do a number of different exercises, so it’s very much an active learning process. We also have some video clips that faculty members and students and employers from the area to tell you a little bit about the business profession and about the particular careers that they are involved in.

What we’d like you to do, once you to go out on the site, is to begin at the "Start Here" button, which is at the bottom of the Home page and let’s go back live now, and show you where that is. So if you go to the bottom of the Home page, you’ll see the "Start Here" button and if you click on that button, it’ll move you to the next page, which is what you should be seeing in your PowerPoint presentation.

You can see in the upper right hand corner, there are two steps the first is a technical check, to make sure that you really can take advantage of the multimedia components in Business 100, we’d like you to go out and check out three different things. First of all, you have to have a Blackboard account and I’ll get into how you log into that in just a moment and where you log into it from if you haven’t done so already. Secondly, you will need the Adobe Acrobat Reader and there are details on how to download that out on the Web page if you don’t have that on your personal computer and you need it. And then lastly, you will need RealPlayer in order to either listen to the speakers or to listen and see the speakers in streaming video.

Step two gives you a course introduction, tells you a little bit about the session today and we hope via email that you have been able to actually go out and see this ahead of time, but clearly you got the message via email or via a friend and we’re glad to have you here. Any questions so far on any of the content that I’ve talked about?

If you attempt to go out to the site and get into Blackboard, you’ll be asked for userid and password and you can see what the dialogue box looks like here. Let’s take a look at how this looks out on the Web site. If I go into lesson modules, for example, you can see that there are 14 lesson modules listed. We’ll go back to these in just a moment, but at the very top of the page is a link to Blackboard and here is that dialogue box that you’re asked to fill out. The userid is the user ID that you would be using for your University of Idaho computer account. For most of you, it’s also your e-mail account name.

As you log into Blackboard, this is the page that you will see and you will be using the assignment drop box to submit all of your assignments. As you go out and look through the modules, you’ll see that we’ve asked you to submit your assignments using Microsoft Word 97 or higher, so you’ll type your assignments up in a Word document after you’ve completed the research or gone to the Web sites that we’ve asked you to go to. You’ll type up what we’ve asked for. Put it in the form of a Word document. They typically are very short assignments, certainly no more than a page.  As you complete Word documents, save them someplace, you’ll go out and use the assignment drop box to submit that assignment. 

If you take a look again at your PowerPoint slide, when you hit the assignment drop box button which I’ll do in a moment, it will display all of the modules in the course, but I think you can see over on the right hand side, at least initially, all of these modules are unavailable for you to go out and actually complete the assignment and submit it. You will see the availability dates and so each module will be open only for that period of time, that’s when you must complete your assignment. You can see that some give you a longer period, two weeks, then do the others. The others are one week periods, so you only have that amount of time to complete the assignment and get it posted. After that it’ll be closed. You will not be able to complete the additional assignments and upload them until the dates that are shown here. You’ll see that you can go out into the Web site, access the modules ahead of time, and you can work on the assignment, you just can’t post it until these dates, so you’ll have full access to the Web site, all of the modules, but again, if you complete the assignment ahead of time, it will be unavailable to you in terms of trying to upload that assignment.

Let me take you out live now and show you that the first module is available to you. You can see the status is different than that on your PowerPoint slide, it’s saying that I have not submitted the first module assignment, but you can see that it is highlighted with a link and if I click on that link, I’ll get directions on how to upload the assignment. You’ll get this dialogue box and what I want to do now is go to the original Business 100 Web site and your PowerPoint slides to show you the five step process that you’ll use to upload a Word file.

At the bottom of each of the modules, you’ll see an assignment submittal set of steps, there are five steps, and if you follow those, it’s really a pretty straightforward process. Make sure you follow them carefully, particularly for the first couple of modules, have the dialogue in front of you and go through it step-by-step until you get the hang of it, and then I think you’ll find that it flows pretty easily after that. On this slide and on the next slide, you’ll see all five steps outlined, and again they’re pretty straightforward, there are a number of steps that you have to go through, buttons that you have to punch and then you finally upload the Word file. I think I have a test one out here. We’ll see if we can go out and grab it. I think I left one out.  NOTE:  Documents created in Microsoft Works automatically default to a wps extension (example:  Module1.wps).  Blackboard can not read a wps file.  Assignments submitted with a wps extension will receive zero credit. You can do a Save As and select "doc" as your extension.

As I move from student files, I get this additional page and I’m going to upload my assignment. I have to go out and find the assignment. It might be on your floppy disk or it might be somewhere that you’ve stored it on your computer account space. There are some naming conventions for your file. You can’t have multiple words that are separated by spaces, this is outlined in the instructions. If you’re going to use something like "module 1", then either run them together or module _1 for the name of your file, if that’s the way you would like to name it. I’ve included the file name and all I want to do is upload it and you can see that it shows up now on that upload page.

What I want to show you now and we’ll go back to the Business 100 Web site, are the three options that you have for viewing the multimedia, depending on the connection that you’ve got. If you’ve got a good T1 connection, that is if you’re viewing it on campus or anyplace where you’ve got a good T1 connection, or even a good wireless connection in the Commons. I’ve experimented over in the Commons and it seems to work reasonably well, but it was at fairly low traffic times, so if you’re over there with wireless, you may find that you have to move to either the second or the third option. We’ll show you what the slide show looks like.  These are just stills with exactly the same words that I am speaking, except that they are just still pictures that move as I talk and it’s just sort of a jumpy picture, but it downloads much quicker [than the full-video]. You wouldn’t use this option if you have high speed connection, you’d use the Real Video. The third option is just audio and that downloads even quicker.

All of the options give you exactly the same words, the only question is whether you’re getting streaming video or not. If you happen to be loading over a modem at home, you want to  just pick the audio portion of it. Again, if you’re on campus, the streaming video would be the way to go. If you’re going to use this online course in lab, you’re going to need a set of headphones and I’m told that they’re in the neighborhood of $10, they’re relatively inexpensive, because you won’t be able to get the sound, obviously, out of the computer without them.

Two things that I want to stress—communication is really important. If you are having problems, don’t sit and stew over it or don’t wait until the very last day of the assignments due, make sure you that you get us some information so that we can fix the problem or at least direct you to the person that can fix the problem for you. We will track all of your movements through the Web site. On our screen as an instructor, we’ll have every place you’ve been and a log of that, so we really want you to complete all of the assignments, including all of the steps in the process of generating that assignment and we do have the ability to track that and we certainly want to make sure that you go through each and every one of the steps, so please do that. If you’re having any problems with it, make sure that you send us an email or ask us questions. 

Let’s go take a look at one of the modules now. So if we go to the accounting major, for example, you can see that there are a number of learning objectives and under each of the learning objectives, you’ll see that there is a considerable amount of text for you to read first. Often times we have you go out to an external Web site to get some information or to do some additional reading. At the bottom of each of the modules is a paragraph labeled "assignment" and you can see that there is a hot link to the assignment page. If we click on that, you’ll see what the assignment is related to and what the particular steps are that are required to complete the assignment. And once again at the bottom of each assignment, you will see the five step process that you need to go through, I guess it’s six, sorry; after you log into Blackboard, there are five additional steps to upload your Word 97 or higher file to post your assignment.

I want to make sure that everybody felt comfortable with the technology.

Please stay in touch. If there are any questions or you have any problems, make sure that you send us an email.

Thank you.