An Important Statement About Taking This All-WWW Course
This course is probably unlike any other University course that you have taken because it is all on the web. Experience has shown that the students who enroll are older, more mature and more self-motivated, often holding down a job during the day and taking the course in non-work hours.
Students in this course are primarily located in Iowa, but many are located all over the US, we are a diverse group.
The advantages of an all WWW-course is that I can bring you much more visual material, and allow you lots of time to absorb it. The disadvantages is that we are geographically dispersed and don't have time for face to face conversations. We will overcome this last aspect by discussing material in the eClassRoom chat room, and by taking weekly exams.
I expect everyone to proceed through this course according to schedule. After we get started we will have weekly assignments and exams, but with well-timed break weeks. You will find the first half of the course more busy than than the second half. Past experience has shown that if you keep up to date you will most likely get an A or B. Students who don't succeed in this course do so because they quit working.
Some students come to this class thinking it will be easier than an on-campus course. Its not easier, its just organized differently. You have flexibility within a day, or week, period, to do the course work, but this is not a "Correspondence Course At Your Own Pace At Home". Keep current and you will succeed.
The Two Most Important Keys To Success:
OBJECTIVES: To introduce the principles of weed science and weed management in 3 component areas:
This site is a very large and complex network of inter-linked web pages. To make it easy to navigate through this site I have provided several tools.
"BACK"
on your web browser (e.g. Netscape; MS Internet Explorer) is the best way to make a single page backup.
"THUMBNAILS"
You must use this when you
look at pictures in the site that have a thumbnail picture which is the "hot
link" to a larger version of the same picture. You can identify a picture that
is a hot link by the border (red) around the picture. Here is an example from the
weed ID section (the only way back to this page is your "BACK" button):
(Very Good!, you just learned what a yellow
foxtail seed looks like, by the way)
"HOME"
is the first page (home page) of the this site, the
hot link icon is usually at the bottom of a page:
"317 WEB SITE MAP"
is also called the wormhole map and is the table of contents of the entire
site. It can be accessed from the home page and elsewhere by
clicking on this cute little guy:
"MENU BARS"
are usually located on stragetic pages, try a few of these out:
The class schedule and assignments are available on the Schedule Page.
This page is dynamic:
I change it continuously as the course proceeds. If you print it out,
don't rely on it for up-to-date information for very long.
Other information is also posted on the eClassRoom bulletin board. Check the WHATSUP? section regularly.
REQUIRED COURSE TEXTBOOKS AND BULLETINS
These are available at the ISU Bookstore in the Memorial Union on campus. Once you enroll, Continuing Education will provide you information on how to obtain these books in their initial (snail mail) letter to you. Contact me if you have problems getting them.
Jack Dekker
3214 Agronomy Hall
ISU, Ames, IA 50011
TEL: 515.294.8229
FAX: 515.294.3163
E-Mail: <jdekker@iastate.edu>
WWW: http://www.public.iastate.edu/~jdekker/homepage.html