INST 734
Information Retrieval Systems
Spring 2018 (Online)
Technology Skills and Tools
Taking an online course requires that you be familiar with the basic
skills that are necessary to see the materials and to interact with
the instructor and your classmates online. The following tools are
required:
- A university directory ID and password. This is needed in
order to use ELMS (the Learning Management System, see below), to
send and receive email using the university email system (or to set
up forwarding) and to access licensed content through the University
Libraries.
- Daily access to a computer with a broadband network connection.
In general, either a PC or a Mac will work fine, but I use a PC and
I am not able to help much with Mac-specific problems. So if you
have a Mac already you can use it, but if you plan to buy a new
computer for this class and you don't already have your heart set on
a Mac I would recommend a PC. You don't need anything very fancy,
and any new $300 laptop or desktop running Windows should do fine.
I don't recommend getting a chromebook or a tablet that lacks a
keyboard, not because it won't work but because I am not able to
assure you that it will.
- Adobe Acrobat Reader to display PDF files. Many computers you
get will already have this, and it not its free to install.
- The ability to display video, at least as as .mp4 files and on
YouTube. Most computers you get will already have this.
- A Web browser. I personally prefer Chrome or Firefox because
for some things they work better than alternatives like Internet
Explorer or Safari, but other browsers should work fine.
In addition, the following abilities and experience are required:
- Daily access to email. I use the university email system. You
may want to do the same thing. If you don't use the university
system, you ned to be sure to forward yuor email from there to
whereever you read email -- otherwise you may not see things that
are sent to the class mailing list. But regardless of what you do,
you will need to see email every day while you are taking this
class.
- Experience using Web browsers, Web search engines, and the
University of Maryland Libraries system for online access to
licensed content. This need not be extensive experience, but you
should be able to find things on the Web and through the library.
- Experience using ELMS, the university's Learning Management
System. We will not use ELMS much -- mostly as a place for you to
submit assignments. Help using ELMS is available from the
University's help desk (301-405-1500).
- Experience with installing new software on your computer. If
you can install a graphical SFTP client such as WinSCP on your
machine, you should know enough to install whatever else you need.
If not (or if you don't know what that means!), now would be a good
time to learn how to do that!
Everything else you need to know, we'll talk about in this course.
But the tools and knowledge listed above I will take as assumed
knowledge. If you need to learn any of these, let me know which ones
and I will try to point you to a suitable resource (but Google can
often find you good advice equally well, and somewhat faster!).
Doug
Oard
Last modified: Sun Jan 14 13:47:10 2018