There are three major elements to this course that are necessary to your success. They are:
- study of the on-line reading materials and hands-on practice with a braille transcribing machine,
- correspondence with the instructor of the course and other students in the course, and
- timely submission of assignments and tests for grading, as desired.
On-line Study
This course consists of twelve sessions. This is a self-paced class. In addition to completing the on-line reading material for the course, each student will need to develop expertise in using a braille transcribing machine. This program only accepts submission of work electronically using one of the electronic brailling tools (Duxbury, Edgar, MegaDots, Pokadot, EDIT-PC, etc.). Each session of the course (with the exception of Session 1) includes exercises designed to help you learn to use the braille writing equipment.
Correspondence
Your learning experience will be greatly enhanced by regular interaction with the course instructor and the other members of the class. Indeed, the value added to this electronic course is your ability to interact with an experienced braillist/braille educator and with other students who are encountering similiar and/or interesting problems. Email can be sent to all participants, including the instructor (and other interested observers) by sending mail to braille@shodor.org. Email can be sent to the course instructors by sending mail to Feedback Form (we are no longer accepting submissions). More information about this is available on our Getting Started page.
Submitting Materials for Grading
Periodically throughout the course, you will be required to submit assignments and tests for grading by the instructor. This will be done through built-in forms and email correspondence OR through submission of brailled documents created using one of the electronic brailling tools. To submit a form-based assignment or test, simply click on the "Submit" button at the bottom of the form, and your answers will be automatically sent to the grader. When an email response is required, the instructor will provide an address to which you can send your response.
More information about the technical aspects of these activities can be found in our "Getting Started" session.
Downloading Sessions
We have received requests to make the files "downloadable". They are are downloadable, by definition! What people want, however, is for all the files for a particular session to be archived into one file, which is then can be downloaded and expanded onto ones person machine.
We prefer not to do that at this stage, for several reasons:
- these materials change occasionally. One of the advantages to the Internet versus print publishing is that we can quickly make changes and fix errors.
- we hope to have a number of technical resources that are not downloadable, using current and future technologies.
We welcome all constructive comments and criticisms about the accessibility of these materials
|