Hi!  Welcome to the Online School of Network Sciences!

Need a little help?  Below are some helpful hints on creating a user here, customizing the environment here, and more.

Creating a User Here

If you tried to create an account and are having problems, there is a video that walks through the process. 

First - the most common problem is that some people claim they never get an email from our system to confirm the account, and almost always, the email ends up going to their Junk or Spam folder.  Be sure to allow emails from this site!

Here is a video that will help:

Lets look at that process as a step by step....

You will also see there are links to "Using and Navigating this site", "How to Take Notes on our PDF's", our "Course Evaluation Form", our "Suggestion Box", and much more.  We encourage you to explore these resources for students.

Our Glossary Function

Before we get started with customization, you will notice a couple of things about the site.  

We have a main Glossary that attempts to find acronyms or terms throughout the site and links the definitions to those terms.  

To get to the Glossary from anywhere on the site, click on Telecom Glossary in the Main Menu bar:

The Glossary will open (be patient - it is big)!

Once opened, you will be presented with the search page:

Type any term into the Search to retrieve the definition.

Term Linking -- You will also notice throughout the site that certain terms have a link appearance.  If you hover on the term with your mouse pointer, a little "?" icon will appear.  If you click on the term, you will get a pop-up that defines the term from our glossary.

Customizing the Experience

Students often ask us how to customize the environment here at the Online School.  There are a couple of simple things that can be done, and this page will describe how to implement them.

Our online school uses Moodle.  The design of the interface allows every user to customize the look and feel of their experience, within certain confines, of course.  We have provided several helpful features below:

• Hiding Blocks and Full Screen
• Using the Dock Feature
• Focusing on a Topic
• Using Completion Tracking

Hiding Blocks and Full Screen

By now you have noticed there are "blocks" of items on the right hand side of the screen in the standard interface that look something like this:

The example chosen is called the Navigation Block.  There will be other blocks depending on where you are in the site.

In the Main Menu, there are two toggles that you can change any time, anywhere in the site: Hiding Blocks and Full Screen.

Hiding Blocks, hides the various blocks to improve real estate on your interface.  

Our site will auto adjust to the window size of your browser or portable device.  Try toggling the Full Screen/Standard View to maximize the use of that window.

Focusing On a Topic/Section

All of our courses are divided into "Topics" or "Sections".

Some of our courses have many sections and it can be hard to focus in on that section and the activities and references associated with just that section.

To help you, some of our courses allow you to collapse and expand the sections to allow you to focus in on a specific topic/section or display all topics/section.  By default, all the topics/sections are expanded when you first enter a course.

In every course you will see a couple of icons at the bottom of the introduction that look like this:

If you want to focus on a section, click on the "Close all" icon, then select the section you wish to expand, and that section will be the only one displaying to you can focus on that section, its contents, and exercises.

You can click on any of the topic/section title bars to expand or collapse them individually:

We hope this helps.

 

Completion Tracking - Keeping track of Your Progress

Some of our courses have multiple steps that you must complete in order to complete a particular topic or section of the course.  We don't want you to miss anything!  We especially do not want you to miss key steps in procedures or assignments.

To help you, we enable completion tracking of your progress in some of those courses.

When completion tracking is available, you will see that next to the activities on the far right, there is a dashed or greyed out check mark.  You can see these in the example below:

In some cases you can check these manually.  In other cases there are activities that will automatically be checked once you complete the activity!  

In either case, these completion tracking icons and markings will help you to keep track of what needs to be done and what has already been done as you progress through a course.  

We hope this function helps.

The Dashboard

Watch this video to understand how the dashboard can help you manage your courses: