Typical Hebrew Course Features
The Announcements page is the first thing you see when you enter your course.
Look here for the instructor's welcome and for new announcements about course updates, new material, or any other special instructions or new assignments. Click the Announcements button any time you're inside the course to return to the Announcements page, which you can think of as the home page for the class.
Look here to meet your instructor when you first begin the course.
Your instructor may put any personal and contact information about herself or himself in this section, or may include this kind of information in the welcome segment of the Course Information area. (For orientation, we change the name of this button to Staff Information and include staff at HCO.) For other courses, your professor will populate this segment, and may include additional contact information, a bio, and sometimes even office hours and how to best reach her or him at those times.
Read this before you begin any work for your course!
In Hebrew courses, the Course Information area contains material such as a welcome and introductory message from the instructor, course description and requirements, information about course textbooks and software, and any other overview information the instructor feels is important for the class. This is another area you want to become familiar with when you first enter a class, and you'll find yourself referring back to it because of the essential information it contains.
You will become very familiar with the Lessons button, because it links you to your core materials.
You may want to read this page, which explains how to navigate within a Hebrew lesson.
In the lessons are
. Exercises.
. Links to more information.
. Links to the oral homework submission feature.
After you do an exercise, you use Blackboard's self-quiz tool to check your answers. The exercise page links to the quiz. Alternatively, you can click the Quizzes button for a list of links to all the quizzes, and access a quiz you'd like to take that way.
The Oral Homework button links to a page containing links to the oral homework pages for each lesson. Like the Quizzes folder, this is a list of oral homework links. You will also find the links to the relevant pages within each lesson as you work on it.
The Oral Homework, Voice E-mail, and Oral Discussion features all use software called Wimba Voice Tools. You can learn more about this software in the Technical Information.
For all Voice Tools uses, your login is the e-mail address you supplied to HCO when you registered, and your password is the same password you have for Blackboard. Your login information is sent to you at the beginning of the semester in an important "Welcome to the Semester" e-mail.
Voice E-mail is another Wimba tool. This one allows you to send a specific recipient your recording in an e-mail. You can try it if you have trouble with the voice board, or if you want to send something to your teacher that no one else will hear. This is where you record your final exam, for example.
In this instance, you will use Voice Tools the way you use a text bulletin board-for assignments in which you will listen to each other's audio and respond as though you were in conversation. For the Oral Discussion assignments, you may do what we asked you not to when responding to exercises: begin your own threads and respond to those of other students.
Academic students spend most of their class time reading and posting to the Blackboard discussion board. The Hebrew courses do not use the discussion boards, except for the Study Buddy program in the Student Center.
Using the discussion board is one of the first things students try in the orientation program. You can read more about the specifics of Using the Discussion Board.
You can view the class list using the roster, and follow links to students' home pages in the student center.
You can send classmates e-mail using this built-in tool-either selecting students individually or choosing to e-mail all class participants at once. (This option includes the instructor in the e-mail.)
This button brings you to the form where you can add information about yourself and upload a photo to share. Viewing access to this page is limited strictly to other HCO students who have access to the online student center by logging on to Blackboard.
In the Tools section, you can manage your personal information for the course, such as your name, contact information, and your password. Bear in mind that any changes you make here are to your student profile in the database, and will apply to all of your HCO classes.
The best and fastest way to get help with technical issues at Hebrew College online (other than Web conferencing) is to use the help desk system. The Help! button in your course brings you directly to that system. You create and manage your own account with the help desk system-it is not associated with other HCO login accounts, and will remain semester to semester even as your courses change.
Once you create your account and log in to the help desk system, you will see a "Self Service" option. Please click that option to read through any self-service item relevant to your question-most likely, your question has come up before and there is a solution. There is also contact information for getting 24/7 help for Web conferencing issues directly from the Web conferencing company.
If you do not find the solution you need, you can then use the "Submit a Service Request" link at the help desk main menu to ask for individual technical help.
