Welcome letter for an online course

ABC’s of Chemistry: Chemistry on Fingertips

Welcome to the online course ‘ABC’s of Chemistry’. This online course will familiarize you with the basic principles of chemistry. This course is geared towards students majoring in most sciences, pharmacy, and chemical, biological and environmental engineering. This eight-week online course would help you to learn a new skill or enhance your existing ones. You'll spend roughly six to seven hours each week completing two course lessons in an enjoyable and interactive learning environment. If you are new to online learning environment don’t worry. My aim is to provide an optimal and user-friendly format for students with differing computer skills. In this course you can be certain of quality instruction, personalized assessment, and tracked progress. I’m excited to have you on board!
Before you begin, test and configure your system for use with this course. The first step is to view ‘How to take online course’ video which is designed to familiarize you with the virtual classroom set up. Before starting course lessons, I advise that you spend some time to learn how to navigate the course website. Navigation tools located at the top of every page are extremely user-friendly and consistent throughout the website. They provide access to every corner of your classroom environment, such as communicating with the instructor, getting assistance from the ‘help desk’, submitting assignments, discussion board, accessing net links, and viewing your grades.
The second step is to download syllabus under the heading syllabus and course material. This link will take you to a page that has a description of the course, course requirements, course goals, recommended books, and grading policy. Read the syllabus thoroughly and direct any course questions or concern to me. My contact information is located on navigation bar under "your instructor".
For coming eight weeks, one lesson will be released every Tuesday and Friday. Your lessons will include text-based reading material, illustrations, audio  or video files if required. Each lesson has an assignment and a brief multiple-choice quiz. You will receive an instant analysis of your multiple-choice quiz. This classroom has 17 interactive discussion forums where you can interact with your classmates; ask questions, share ideas and concerns. You are required to respond to two classmates each week. I strongly recommend that you complete each lesson within ten days of its release because the assignments and discussion forums, accompanying each lesson, will not be accessible after that. Your first assignment is to introduce yourself through first Discussion forum.

The course concludes with a final exam, which can be completed within two weeks of the release of Lesson 16. If you do not understand any aspect of your coursework, contact me for clarification or post your question in discussion board so that others can get the answer if they have the same query.

What can you expect from this course: You can expect support in all aspects of the learning environment including but not limited to communication with me, timely grading on assignments, updates on your progress and e-mails help from technical support and administrative personnel on any issue or concerns you might have.

-Savneet Singh

 
Letter Construction Analysis

The course EDUI 6701 has helped understand what  online learning is all about and enabled me to write this welcome letter using whatever knowledge I have gained till date. In the first paragraph of my welcome letter, I mentioned that my aim is to provide an optimal and user-friendly format for students with differing computer skills. In Mini lecture 1 , Dr. Chico indicates, ”Actually, there’s no such thing as “best” practices – ones which fit all learners in all situations. But there are a lot of good practices in teaching and learning, online or elsewhere.”(Chico, N. (2012). Mini-Lecture EDUI 6701-1). Thus, I wanted to create, perhaps, the ‘best’ online format so that the students having both basic and  advanced computer skills can take the course with same ease.  The target audiences of the course are students majoring in most sciences, pharmacy, and chemical, biological and environmental engineering. I clearly mentioned this in first few lines. Know your audience is the key-Anne Guptill (Guptill, A. Discussion board, EDUI 6701).

The welcome letter introduces learners to the kind of online environment, they will be exposed to, during the course. It is very important that students feel comfortable in the virtual classroom and know every corner of it. So, I provided the details of look and feel of their virtual classroom. According to Ed Hootstein’s model, I tried to fit in Program manager’s role here, whose work is to  “”Develop study guides for courses to help ease learners' anxiety and address both content and technical concerns. (Ed Hootstein, E-Learning 1.0.). The letter clearly mentions that learners are required to participate in the Discussion Board. Ed Hootstein placed great emphasis on the importance of encouraging and ensuring a high degree of interactivity and participation as one of the most important facilitation skills in online learning environment and, this is, Social director’s role to  create such a collaborative environment.
According to Nancy Levenburg, ‘The curriculum for online courses must be based in clear learning objectives. Achievement of objectives may be facilitated through the use of cohort lectures and provocative and informative readings/articles geared to conveying the basic concepts and facts’. Keeping this fact in mind, I plan to include text- based reading material, illustrations, audio  or video in course lessons. Using a single mode of instruction, such as lecture, PowerPoint, discussion can be boring. Blending audio, video, images, charts, graphs and other visual can increase student interest and motivation.
This course will include assignments and a brief multiple-choice quiz those have to be submitted by deadlines.  Jones & Martinez found that if the instructor of the course aggressively engage students in course activities and require students to submit segments of the project by deadlines, the students completed the course with a very satisfactory project that needed minimal revisions. (Jones & Martinez, 2001; Martinez, M., 2001)
In last paragraph I mentioned what learners can expect from me as an instructor or the support staff. Judith Hughes claims that, ‘Learners need to know both what is expected of them, and what services they can expect to receive from the institution’. (Huges Judith A., Supporting the Online Learner). When students understand what is expected of them, they have a clear focus of what they must do in order to achieve success.