Class Tips and Procedures Quiz

The following are some class procedures and tips that you need to be aware of as you begin this course. You have already encountered some of this information in earlier assignments from this week. Other information presented here may be new to you. Make sure you read through the information below carefully, and then take the Quiz when you are done.

Class Procedures and Tips

Online course and meeting in person. This is a fully online course and no in-person activities are required. There are no scheduled class sessions on campus. All coursework will be completed online using the course website and the Desire2Learn course management system. The instructor, Laura Gibbs, will organize some optional study sessions on campus periodically throughout the semester. In addition, students are strongly encouraged to find a study partner in the class to meet with at least once a week, one on one, to practice speaking Greek with. Larger study groups might also be helpful, but one-on-one partner pairs are probably the most effective use of your time. You can use the Discussion Board at Desire2Learn to find study partners in the class based on your time and availability.

Time commitment. This is a five-unit course, and you will need to spend anywhere from 10 to 12 hours per week study for this class (in other words, the 5 hours you would have spent in the classroom, plus the 5-7 hours you would spent preparing for class in addition to the scheduled class time).

Deadlines. Beginning in Week 2 of the class, there are strict deadlines for all assignments. You should not put off these assignments until the last minute! So, for example, if an assignment is due by Thursday at midnight, you should really try to finish that assignment on Tuesday or Wednesday. By putting things off until the last minute, you run the risk of missing the deadline and failing to receive credit for your work. Extensions will be granted for serious medical emergencies only.

Grading. The grading in this course is based on the accumulation of points. There are 450 points available during the semester, plus approximately 30-40 points for extra credit activities that will be made available. Students who make 410+ will receive an A; 360-409 will receive a B; 320-359 will receive a C; a minimum of 301 points is required to pass the course. You can check your total points in the Desire2Learn Gradebook at any time, allowing you to keep track of your progress. You can miss 40 points' worth of assignments and still receive an A, and you can miss even more if you are doing the extra credit assignments too. It should not be difficult to get an A in the class if you are willing to put in the time required (10-12 hours of work per week). You can read more about the Grading system in the online syllabus for this course.

Honor Code. You are expected to complete the quizzes for this course on your own, without help from another person, although you are free to use your books, notes, and other written references to complete the quizzes. You must be very careful when you do the Gradebook Declarations! Please read the text of each Declaration very carefully so that you do not make a false Declaration, even accidentally. False Gradebook Declarations are a violation of the Honor Code and will be penalized heavily. If you make a false Gradebook Declaration up to 50 points may be removed from your total points. Under no circumstances should you fill out a Gradebook Declaration before you have successfully completed the assignment. If you have any questions at all about filling out a Gradebook Declaration, contact the instructor to get clarification. You can read more about the Honor Code in the online syllabus for this course.

Time management. You will find it much more effective to spend 1-2 hours per day on the work for this class, rather than putting the work off and trying to complete it all at once. A significant portion of the week's work is due on Friday, but that is no reason to put it off until Friday! You should work out a daily schedule that fits in with your other commitments, while allowing you to complete the assignments for this class before the deadline. You can work up to two weeks in advance! So when you have a slower week in your other classes, use that as an opportunity to get ahead in this class. It is very important that you keep track of the time that you spend on this class, and make sure you that plan for it just as you would for a regularly-scheduled classroom class.

Course calendar. In general, you will have 2-3 lessons in the textbook each week to complete, and there are assignments due every day of the week, Monday through Friday. You can work up to two weeks ahead if you want. There is one week off at Thanksgiving, from Monday November 21 through Sunday November 27. No assignments are due during this Thanksgiving break. Students who are working ahead may find it possible to complete the course by Thanksgiving - which would give you the time to focus on finals and other end-of-semester projects in your other classes.

Computer requirements. To successfully complete this course, you will need regular access to a computer with broad-band Internet access (either DSL or cable modem). You will find it very frustrating trying to do the audio assignments for this class with only a phone dial-up connection! To work with the Greek fonts, you need to be using Windows 2000 or XP, or Macintosh OS-X. The older operating systems are not able to accommodate the Greek fonts. To use the Desire2Learn system, you will need to be running Internet Explorer or Firefox as your browser (note to Macintosh users: Safari is not a Desire2Learn-approved browser). You will need a microphone to record your voice for this class. You can either use the built-in microphone on your computer (if it has one), or you can purchase a simple microphone inexpensively at Office Depot, Best Buy, etc.

Textbook. The textbook you will be using for this course is Clayton Croy's Primer of Biblical Greek.

Course website. There are lots of materials at the course website which supplement the materials included in the textbook. You will be working with the textbook and with pages at the course website every week. You may find it helpful to print out some of the pages from the course website in order to keep them for later review, to take notes on them, etc. Since this is the first time that the course is being offered, there may be many typographical errors, broken links, etc. at the course website. If you find a typographical error or broken link, send me an email containing the address of the page (this is very important!) and a description of the error, and you will receive extra credit! (1/2 point of credit for each typo, broken link, or other error that you find).

Email. Course-related email sent from the Desire2Learn system will be sent to your OU email address. It is your responsibility to check your OU email on a daily basis, Monday through Friday. When you send email to the instructor, please make sure you include a descriptive subject line that contains the word Greek somewhere in the subject. When you are sending email that is in response to a specific assignment, make sure you include the subject line specified in the assignment instructions.

Desire2Learn. Desire2Learn is the course management system for this course. You will take quizzes there and make Gradebook Declarations, and you will also use the Desire2Learn Discussion Board. Even if you are not taking a quiz or using the Discussion Board that day, you should log on to the Desire2Learn system every day, Monday through Friday, to check the class announcements that will appear there.

Quizzes. The quizzes can be taken repeatedly up until the stated deadline, at which time the quiz will become unavailable. The average of all your quiz attempts will be recorded in the Gradebook. When you take a quiz you can stop part-way and save your answers and come back to the quiz again later. After the quiz deadline has passed, you will be able to go back to your quiz attempts and see which questions you got right and which questions you got wrong, but while the quiz is still available you will only be able to see your score for the quiz, without any details about the answers. The quizzes are graded on a percentage basis, which determines the number of points recorded in the Gradebook. So, for example, if you get a 86% score on a quiz, and it is worth 4 points, then 3.44 points will be recorded in the Gradebook. Many of the quiz questions are graded as "right-minus-wrong" which means that you are penalized for wrong answers. So, for example, if you are supposed to identify both the gender and the number of a noun, and you get the gender right but the number wrong, you will receive zero points (1-1=0). The lowest score you can receive on a right-minus-wrong question is zero - you will not actually get a negative score on a right-minus-wrong question, even if the number of wrong items in your answer exceeds the number of right items.

Discussion Board. Please be kind and thoughtful when you use the Discussion Board! Remember that you are writing to your fellow students - and use their names when you are replying to them so that you can get to know each other, just as you would do in a regular classroom. The main idea is to use the Discussion Board to get help and to help others as they learn Greek. And since Greek is not an easy language to learn, we can all use all the help we can get! This is going to be a difficult and demanding course, and some folks may be feeling very anxious about their language skills, especially when it comes to speaking the Greek out loud. So please be supportive of your fellow students - the class will be a much stronger experience for everyone if we can support each other all the way! If you feel that something inappropriate has been posted to the Discussion Board, please contact the instructor about that. If you have posted something at the Discussion Board in error that you would like to remove, you can edit the post so that it says "Posting Error," and then contact the instructor so that the post can be deleted. You are able to edit your posts are you publish them, but you cannot delete them. Only the instructor is able to actually remove posts from the Discussion Board.

Language learning tips. Human beings are great language learners - it is wired into our brains! So don't worry: each and every one of you is perfectly capable of learning Greek! It is also the case, however, that many people have taken poorly taught language courses in school, and have often developed a sense of fear or inferiority about learning languages. I hope this class will help you to enjoy learning languages and to feel confident in your abilities! The most important advice I can give you is to do everything - everything! - OUT LOUD. Do not ever read Greek silently. Do not ever write Greek silently. You should be making noise all the time that you are studying! Language is primarily an oral phenomenon. Our brains are wired for speaking languages - but writing is a highly advanced and artificial technique that came very very late in the history of languages. Even Greek was an oral tradition for many centuries before writing was invented. So please try to use the listening and speaking areas of your brain to help you learn this language. Learning to read and write Greek is very important, of course - but the way you will learn to read and write Greek is by speaking Greek and listening to it!

Why learn Biblical Greek? There are lots of reasons why someone might study Biblical Greek. Christians might study Biblical Greek for obvious reasons, but there are also important reasons why Jews would study Biblical Greek as well - the Greek version of the Hebrew Bible, called the Septuagint, is a vitally important document in Jewish religious history. Please make sure you read Croy's discussion of the Septuagint in Lesson 1, section 8, since there will be optional readings from the Septuagint in every lesson of Croy. You might also want to study Biblical Greek for reasons unconnected with religion. For example, the Bible narratives are some of the most fascinating stories preserved from the ancient world, and they make comparatively easy reading material for beginning Greek students. If you successfully complete this Biblical Greek course you will find that it provides a solid introduction to your further study of Jewish and Christian Greek writing, but it also gives you a great start in reading classical Greek texts as well. To find out what classical Greek course you should enroll in after completing this course, contact the Classics department to see what advice they can give you about their classical Greek course offerings.

Take the True-False Quiz

After reading the information on this page, you should be ready to take the True-False Quiz in Desire2Learn. Make sure you have also read the information about the Septuagint in Croy Lesson 1, section 8, since questions about the Septuagint may also be included in the quiz.

Format of the quiz: For each question, you will see a set of five statements. At least one of those statements is false, and possibly two or even three might be false. Your task is to select ALL of the statements that are true (that is why this type of question is called "multi-select"). Your response is marked as right when you select a true statement and when you do not select a false statement. Your response is marked as wrong when you select a false statement or fail to select a true statement. Your score on each question is determined by the number right minus the number wrong (although even if you get more responses wrong than right, you cannot get a negative score on any one question - the lowest score you can get on any one question is zero). You may take the quiz as often as you want, up until the deadline of Monday at midnight.