EGR 437:
Getting Started
The web portion of this class will be prototyped during the Fall semester of 1998. It will be offered primarily to residential NAU students along with a few distance students that will be testing and providing feedback on the distance delivery aspects of the course. Course information is provided below to help you use and navigate through this on-line course.
For hardware, software, and plugins required for this class, please see the Help page.
Residential Students
The on-line material represents daily lecture notes. As a residential student, you are required to access and study these lecture notes prior to class. You will be given directions during class as to which notes to read prior to the next class. Class time will be structured as a recitation period; reserved for:
- discussing and working on homework problems;
- questions about and further elaboration on the on-line lecture notes, book readings, and course content;
- project information and discussion;
- test taking;
- and other course-related activities.
If you miss class, you will be responsible for finding out from another student what additional information and material was discussed or provided. A portion of your course grade (see syllabus) will be given to attendance and in-class participation.
Distance Students
If you are a distance student taking this class through the Web, you must register for the second section of this course and obtain the class text books prior to the first day of instruction. Refer to NAU Online to register and to order books.
Students who will be prototyping the distance delivery of this course must take extra care to stay on schedule with the residential students. Homework, project assignments and exam expectations are the same as those requirements experienced by the residential students. Distance students, however, will need to fax their assignments and tests in to the instructor no later than 10:00 a.m. on the stated due date. The fax number is 520-523-2300. All faxes must clearly identify the class, the instructor, and assignment title.
We will extensively use the NAU VCC to provide up=to-date class related information and to facilitate communication between students and instructor. If you haven't done so yet, please register with VCC and join the EGR 437 conference.
Site Navigation
This web-based class is divided into 7 major modules and a semester-long project, which can be found and linked to on The Class page. The seven learning modules are sequentially organized to correspond to the process of designing and analyzing a simple single-story wood roof, masonry wall building. Each of these modules is subdivided into topics and possibly numerous sub-topics. The following work breakdown structure shows the relationship between course modules and module topics.
Care is taken in the design of the on-line materials to help you navigate through this very deep and extensive site. Links to each topic are provided on each module home page. Most of the time, these topic links are integrated onto a picture that captures the essence of that module. Similarly for those topics that are subdivided into sub-topics, the sub-topic links are found as either integrated on a representative picture or as simple text buttons on the topic home page.
In addition to these topic and sub-topic links, navigation information is provided at the top and left-hand side of each page as further explained below.
Navigation in Top Bar
General course information resides here permitting the user to quickly move to: getting started, course syllabus, library, instructor, class communication, getting help, or getting to the top page of the course material, the class. These buttons can be clicked at any time, no matter how deep you are into the course.
In addition, hyper-link path information (e.g. how you got here from there) is provided on each page. Notice that all links to pages or dialogue boxes in this class are blue.
Navigation in Side Bar
