When teaching an online  or web-enhanced course, how do you make essential course information stand out from all the rest of the course content?

The first week in an online environment can be overwhelming.

In addition to encountering Desire2Learn, students are provided with a course tour that reviews the syllabus, explains how to participate in discussions, and submit assignments. They may also have video tutorials on how to use the text editor, links to web tools that will be used in the course, and tutorials on how to upload assignments created with the tools in D2L. And of course, they have discussions where they can introduce themselves to their peers and get to know one another!

Important administrative tasks can produce a visually overwhelming amount of content for the first week.

The idea behind week zero is to place the essential course information for functioning in the online space in a separate module, so that week one contains only course content. This may help to ensure students view and understand the information presented to them.