ENG 260 syllabus > main parts of the course > Calendar

One of the most important parts of the course will be the Calendar tool. To get to the Calendar, click on its link under the Course Tools menu:

appearance of the Calendar in an eLearning room

By default, the Calendar always opens to the current month, and the current day will be highlighted in yellow. Note in the example above that that the block for one of the days for this month, namely the 27th, has text in it, and notice also that the text specifies a certain date range, namely August 27 through September 6, which is the period that the assignment linked to it is supposed to cover. Most importantly, note the colon (:) at the end of the text in the box. Whenever you see this at the end of a Calendar entry, then there is always going to be more that you must look at for this assignment than just what you see in the box. That is, some assignments are going to be short enough to fit in a day box, but most of your assignments are going to have so much text that they'll be too big for a single box.

So here's what you do: if you see any assignment for a certain date end in a colon, click on the date number itself. Up will pop another window that will give you the full assignment. For example, here's what you'd see if you clicked on the 27 of this month in the sample calendar above:

example of a full day entry from the Calendar

This would mean that during the period of August 27 through September 6--and I will refer to these periods in our course as "weeks" or "weekly periods" even though some of them will not be exactly a calendar week, i.e., some will cover more than seven consecutive days--I want you to read all the things I list here (as illustrated, I'll always give the specific text the reading is from and which page numbers you'll find that reading on). This arrangement also signifies that you can do these readings at any time during the stated period, but I'd advise you not to procrastinate, i.e., don't try to do all the readings on the very last day of the period.

Now I call your attention to the last item in this example, namely "- make at least one posting to the eLearning Discussions board for the week of August 27-September 7." If you're sharp (and you must be or you wouldn't be here), you'll note that the end day of the period was previously listed as September 6, but now here we've got September 7. It's not a typo; you'll see this pattern repeated throughout the course. That is, the end of a discussion period will normally be one day beyond the period I give you to do the readings and will usually coincide with the day of a quiz. There's a reason it's done like this, and I'll explain in the "quizzes" part of the subsection "Assessments" of this section of the syllabus.

Speaking of this discussion board, to learn all about what you need to do with this, in just a minute you can go to the subsection "Discussions" of the "main parts of the course" section of this syllabus. But first, here's a little sequential breakdown of the major topics and events of the course:

  • short stories about sports
  • Exam One
  • novels about sports
  • Exam Two
  • poems about sports
  • plays about sports
  • Final Exam

The specific dates for the exams (as well as for the readings quizzes) and information on the particular readings that you must complete during the various weekly periods during each of the major units will be given on the Calendar in the ways described above.