Transcript name: Taking a course in DB2 University, a guided tour

English
In this video we give you a few tips that can help you improve your experience when taking a
course in DB2 University.
We will cover the following topics:

- Setting up the date and time in your profile

- Navigating through a course
- Reviewing a course structure

When reviewing a course structure, we will talk about

- The “Welcome” section

- Lessons
- The “Final exam” section

Date/time setup in your profile

Let’s start by setting up the date and time in your profile in this system so that all dates and times
displayed are local to you. This is important to avoid confusion about deadlines for assignments
or the time and date of the final exam.

This is done by changing the timezone following these steps:

- From the Navigation block, drill down to Home -> My Home

- Within the “My profile settings”, click on “Edit profile”
- Scroll down until you find the “Timezone” field, and choose the right one for your country.
So for example, let’s say I’m in Vancouver, Canada, then I would choose the option for
Americas/Vancouver. If you don’t see your city listed, you can scroll further down and
specify the timezone based on UTC time
- Scroll down to the bottom of the page and make sure to click on the “Update profile”
button

Once this is done, the times shown in DB2 University would be local to you. For example, let’s
take a look at the Final Exam section. The instructions will still say things like “The final exam is at
8:00am Toronto time”, but below this text, the system should be giving you the local time for your
city.

Course navigation

Let’s now talk about course navigation. Navigating through a course is fairly easy, if you plan to
follow the course sequentially (which is what we recommend), simply scroll down to see the
course content.

If you prefer to use the navigation menu, keep the following in mind:

1)
On the left side of a course you have two blocks, Navigation and Settings.

From the Navigation or Settings block, take a look at the little icons at the top right corner.
The first one with a + or – symbol is used to expand or collapse the menu.
The second one is to move the whole block to the dock. This may be convenient when you want
the whole screen to be used for the course content, and also when you scroll down since the dock
will remain fixed.

If you click on “Navigation” in the dock, you can see the expanded menu.
If you want to undock this block, simply click on the first little icon at the top right corner again.

2)
To go to a specific item in a course, you can use the navigation block and expand the little
“twisties” that look like triangles until you find the item you wish to review. Then click on that item,
and the contents will be shown on the right side.

3)
If you would like to collapse all lessons except the one you are interested on, click on the box at
the right corner of the lesson. For example, let me click on this box for Lesson 4.

As you can see, only the Welcome section, and Lesson 4 will be displayed. The “Welcome”
section cannot be collapsed, and is the section that includes important links like the course forum.

If you go to the bottom of the page, you can choose to “Jump to” a given lesson. For example, I
choose to Jump to Lesson 2. Click anywhere outside that box, and you will be taken to that
lesson.

If you would like to see all lessons again when you scroll down, go back to the top right corner of
a lesson, and click on the two little rectangles icon. Now all lessons will be displayed when you
scroll down.

One last thing I would like to mention is the “Gradebook”. You can look at your grades
(assuming they were marked by your instructor) at any time by going to the “Settings” block and
choosing “Grades”

Course structure

Let’s move on, and talk about the course structure in DB2 University. Typically a course has this
structure:

- A “Welcome” section
- Lessons
- A “Final exam” section

The Welcome section includes general information about the course, such as the pre-requisites
to take the course, the grading scheme, the deadlines, and so on.

In this section you may also find links to download all the course material (videos, transcripts).
This can be handy in case your internet connection is slow, and you cannot watch videos online.

Whenever you have a question or encounter a problem while taking a course, refer to this section
for help since it includes links to the course forum, the course chat room, the online manuals,
reading material, and more.

We recommend you monitor the course forum often as it is used the main means of
communication by the instructors of the course. You can optionally subscribe to the forum which
would send you copies of posts to your email.

Once you are familiar with the Welcome section, you can start the course by taking Lessons.

Each lesson will explain first its objectives, and provide the instructions to follow. Most of the
content is provided using videos like this one, and the videos have subtitles. In addition,
transcripts of each video are provided in PDF format right after the video. This can be handy
especially if you want to refresh your memory about a topic you learned earlier; you can easily
search in the transcript for the topic. This is a lot easier than searching within a video.

Whenever you complete a task in a lesson, like watching a video or transcript, a check mark will
appear besides the task; however, you need to click on the refresh button in your browser to see
it.
Lessons may have reading material, and some of the tasks may be optional. If they are optional,
they will be clearly marked as such.

Lessons may also have assignments that you need to complete and submit. Typically there are
two types of assignments:

- The ones where you need to upload and submit a file for review and marking
- The ones where you are presented with an online form where you just need to type some
content

In most courses you are only allowed to submit your assignment once, so make sure you review
carefully your assignment before submitting.
Some activities within a lesson may be restricted because they are dependant on the completion
of other activities. For example, you may not be able to access “assignment #2” instructions, if
“assignment #1” was not completed. The reasons why an activity may not be available are clearly
displayed.
Now let’s move on to the final section in a course, the final exam section.

The final exam section includes a “Practice exam”. You can take this practice exam at any time
and as many times as you wish.

Trying out this practice exam will let you see the format of most exams in DB2 university. A few
things to note:

- Questions and answers within each question are shuffled randomly

- Questions have penalties for incorrect answers

That’s it! We hope you enjoy the courses in DB2 University! Bye now!