Week 1: Orientation Orientation Activities - Course Syllabus - Instructor: laura-gibbs@ou.edu

Orientation Week: Monday January 14 - Friday January 18

Welcome to Mythology-Folklore online! For many of you, this may be the first time you have taken a fully online course, but don't worry: we will spend the first week of classes, Monday January 14 - Friday January 18, doing Orientation Activities to help prepare you for your online activities this semester. You have deadlines starting on Tuesday, with specific assignments due every day. Please make sure you pay careful attention to these deadlines... and remember that you have a lot of freedom and flexibility in this online course: you can do the work before the deadline and save yourself a lot of worry and stress!

Ready to get started? If you want, you can start the course early. In fact, I strongly encourage you to start as early as you can! All the Week 1 Orientation activities will be available one week before the start of classes. Classes officially begin on January 14, so if you want you can start the course one week early, on Monday, January 7. All of the assignments except for the last one can be completed in advance, and you can even get started on Week 2 and Week 3 assignments as well, to get an extra early start.

Below you will find a list of the REQUIRED activities for Week One. The total time required to complete these tasks is approximately 7-8 hours, which is the amount of time you can expect to be spending on this class every week. You may find it useful to print this page so that you can check off the items one by one as you finish them.

Midnight deadlines: As you will see, there are midnight deadlines. This means that if you have something due on Tuesday midnight, that means you must finish the the assignment on Tuesday, by midnight at the latest. Just because an assignment is due at midnight does not mean you have to wait until that night to do the assignment! You will find the class much less stressful if you do the assignments well in advance of the deadlines. The deadlines are just there to keep you on schedule - not to encourage you to do the assignments late at night!

YOU HAVE DEADLINES ON TUESDAY, JANUARY 15. Although you are free to schedule your daily activities at whatever time you want, there are deadlines in this class which are strictly enforced. The best strategy is to work ahead, and that way you will not get stressed out about the deadlines.