• The Course Objectives

• Course Structure
  • Compulsory and Optional Syllabus
  • Sections, Sessions and Exercises
  • The Design of the Site
  • How to collect Dingbats
  • The Resource Section

• Getting All your Dingbats - making sure that ALL your work is credited.

• Mac and PC Differences

• Material Included for Students

The Course Objectives:

• All users will be using E-mail effectively to their needs, personal or business.
• All users, will be able to find and contact on-line groups, of particular interest to them, via news groups or bulletin boards.
• All users will subscribed to a mail list
• All users will have been introduced to real time chat, in the form of both Moos (Multi-User-Dungeon, object oriented) and IRC (Internet Relay Chat), with the opportunity to take both of these applications much further if the student wishes to follow these courses.
• All users will be confident in using the WWW to search for information
• All users will understand the nature of HTML the WWW 'mark-up language', and if they choose this course, able to use basic tags effectively.
• All users will leave the course with their own web page which will be on-line and contain amongst things of their choice, a CV.
• All users will be able to use FTP (File Transfer Protocol) to gain access to software and articles.
• All users will have the opportunity to understand Telnet's role in the Network and what it's applications are.

Course Structure

Compulsory and Optional Syllabus

• There is a lot of information available on this site and rather than give everyone a brief overview of the applications, we have decided to make certain applications compulsory and others optional.

• This allows all users to be grounded in the basic essential applications; FTP, Eudora, and Mailing Lists. It also gives the opportunity for users to customise the course to their own interests.

• There is a comprehensive introduction to HTML which alone could be added to the compulsory areas and constitute more than the required material for passing the course. We hope the course to run to a point where everyone will be covering the same sections. From that point users can go off and follow their own paths.

Sections, Sessions and Exercises

• The topics will be presented as sections, a section will have an introductory page listing the objectives of that section.

• Contained within it is various sessions of work, many of these sessions will be reading in order to carry out an activity in a future session.

• During the sections, exercises will be delivered, where relevant. These exercises form part of the course requirements, and give us some feedback as to how quickly people are getting through the course.

The Design of the Site

• The web site that has been designed to give you this training has certain features to help your manoeuvring around the sections.

• The structure of the home page gives you a full contents page, all of the listed items are links to that particular page, for e.g., if you want to turn within the section on MOOs to the session on MOO clients then you click here and the link takes you to that page. You can see which places you have visited as they change colour once they have been visited.

• On each page you will find a black bar containing arrows to the previous page and the page to come. This is useful when you are working through a few sessions in the same section so that you do not have to go back to the main page all the time.

• At any point in the training, if you come across a term or phrase that you do not understand then you can click on our GLOSSARY button, which you will find among other things at the top of each page that you visit. The glossary is a comprehensive guide to internet terminology.

• As well as the GLOSSARY you will also find the other buttons quite useful, MAIN takes you back to the main home page and SUB takes you to the sub section page, listing the objectives and contents of that section. The CONTACT button takes you to the IDEA page with contact numbers and addresses.

How to collect Dingbats

• There are credits called dingbats assigned to each session, the course requirement is that you collect at least 100 dingbats over the course.

• It has been divided so that the Compulsory Areas of the course constitute 70 dingbats, and before you start the course material you collect 30 dingbats just from the Lecture and Lab attendance and plugging in your modem at home.

• All compulsory sessions are in bold and the optional sessions say optional after them in brackets.

• The dingbat listings can be found on the SUB SECTION page, this page also lists objectives etc for that section.

The Resource Section

• The resources page constitutes a page dedicated to furthering students knowledge in any of the areas by extra reading and materials.

• It is required that each user choose at least one reference from the resources page for each section of the course. We expect users to spend at least one hour on this material.

Getting All your Dingbats - making sure that ALL your work is credited.

• It is important that all work by users is accounted for by idea in order for course completion, so users will be asked to fill in and send the Resources Form which tells idea what section is being read for and the title of the reference that student chose.

• It is important to credit you for all the time that you have spent doing the resources section. If you have had to go out and buy a magazine or find a book in the library or spent time downloading sites, this is time that you can be credited for also. Do not underestimate your time!

Mac and PC Differences

• Throughout the course there will be some sessions and some exercises that will only be applicable for your particular system Mac or PC. We have tried to make this clear and on the sections where this is relevant we have included a note about it in the SUB page please take note of these so that you do not get confused trying to work on material designed for another system.

Material Included for Students

• As part of this course, there have been two useful functions added to the site. There are mailing lists available as part of the course, students will subscribe to these in the compulsory part of the course. It is hoped that this makes communication free and easy between students.
• Another function to make communication easy is the E-mail list that shall be distributed among students. Again there is a compulsory exercise associated with this in the course and it is hoped that this helps communication between students.