Ex'pression Students

Dear Students,

As many of you have noticed your online general education courses are only appearing on your Portal two days a week in the next term (beginning May 20). Rest assured that you will still continue to log in to your classes as normal on expressiononline.com website. This is a change only for attendance posting purposes and does not decrease the content hour participation in your general education course. You are still encouraged to log in to the online platform as much as possible. And just as a refresher please remember the following about the online courses.

1. Participation is a large part of your grade. Participation generally means contributing to the on-going discussions that occur in each class. In order to do this you should be logging in often (at least 4 times a week) to check on the discussion threads while you are working on your other projects.

2. Expect to spend up to 10 hours a week working in your online class. Some of you will work faster, some slower – there isn’t a “time spent” requirement. If you can do the work in 3 hours, good job. If you can do the work in 45 minutes, good job. The time it takes is up to you. (Yes, we track how long you spend on each page but your grade is based on what you do rather than how long it takes you to do it.)

3. Don’t use the browser “back” button. The course shells are self-contained and sometimes have back buttons built in that look like this: <– Use those instead; using the browser back buttons may not always work.

4. Opening different pages in the same class in different browser tabs may not always work. You might find that your browser gets confused and begins to display the same page on both tabs.

5. Internet service providers may consider you to be inactive and cut your connection after 60 or 90 minutes. This is normal. Since the platform is basically self-contained for navigation the browser/service provider may see you as inactive (always sitting on the expressiononline.com site) even though you are navigating around the class. This is very important to keep in mind if you are spending a lot of time typing in discussion thread or test answers. Consider typing your answer in a word processing program and copy/pasting it into the discussion or test.

6. Do pay attention to due dates. Missing due dates may result in assignments not being accepted for grading.

7. Don’t just disappear. If you’re having difficulty, come get help. You can contact your instructor via email, you can come in to the on-campus lab for online students (Room 101 in the South Wing), contact the Office of Student Affairs for tutoring assistance, or contact the Registrar Office if you just don’t know where else to turn.

8. No one said it would be easy but with a little focus and determination you will be successful. Remember: you get out of it what you put into it.

Drop by and see the completed LMW documentaries!

Congratulations to Team Behind You consisting of  sound students Daniel Furth and Griff Chafey,  for their awesome Halo 4 prowess in taking the top prize!

Thanks to Malcolm Henry (D-Pad game club leader), Janna Uy (Student Alliance member) who helped organize the event, all our Student Alliance Volunteers, and everyone who showed up. We had so much fun, hope you did too!

Want to see more pics? Check out the Student Alliance Facebook  page.