Notice to
Students of LIS 5703

This online course is  a "paced" course experience.  What that means is that we on the instructional team have a very definite schedule of events that are expected to take place on time. 

From five year's of past experience teaching this course, we can already tell you that if you do not keep up with the things that are assigned to you to do, your grade will suffer, and we may even be forced to drop you from the course.  The things you will need to be keeping up with include not only required readings, but also visiting web sites that are brought to your attention, and using searching services and library databases that are made available to you. 

If you are likely to have job-related or other outside activities take place during the time period of this semester--activities that make it impossible for you to participate, on a weekly basis, in the activities of this course--we advise you to think seriously about not taking the course.

Getting Started--Technically

One of the great difficulties at the beginning of each semester of this course has been the delay caused by having to set time aside to work out technical issues that individual students need to have already taken responsibility for handling:

• knowing that they have an appropriate browser version on their machine
• knowing what their their official OU username and password is (4+4 and your own password: see http://accounts.ou.edu)  . . . in order to log into both the course's Blackboard course management area as well as getting access to several of the OU Library's database services that will be required of students to use in the course, getting OU email, etc.

If you have questions about your OU account username and password see the web page about it on the OU Accounts page given above.