Online Course

Technical Requirements

Please note that you must have all the following technical pre-requisites to take the S* Bioinformatics Online course :

1) Computer and Operating System

• Pentium III and above

• Sufficient RAM memory to run video applications (typically 64Mb RAM)

• Sufficient Diskspace to store downloaded course materials (typically 1Gbytes space left)

• Network Interface card (for Local Area Network LAN Internet connectivity) or Modem Card (for dialup connectivity)

• Sound card and speakers (for listening to the lectures)

• Windows Operating System: Win95/Win98/Win2000/ME/XP/NT

• [Optional]: Printer (for printing out lecture notes)

• If you have a Macintosh or Unix computer, you should anticipate problems ranging from minor glitches to impossibilities. So you are advised to find a PC. Mac emulation of Windows software does not always work.

2) Internet Access

1. Email: all S* communications with Course participants are via email

2. Web browsing: all basic S* content is Web-based and delivered via a Web browser

3. Windows Media Player: all S* audio-video content is delivered via Windows Media server. We do not have RealPlayer, MPEG, DVD formats yet.

If you are on dialup, your "last mile" connection should be at least 28.8kbps speed, and your upstream provider should have an unsaturated Internet link. Otherwise, you will never be able to see video streaming. If you don't know, ask your ISP If you are on LAN network via your institution, you should have 100Mbps (Category 5 cabling) local/campus area network with an unsaturated Internet link typically for a large modern university of 10,000 students, at least 15 Mbps or else, you will experience great difficulty in S* Course videos.

3) Software Applications

1. Email software (eg. Netscape Communicator, Eudora, Outlook, etc) or Web-Based Email (eg. Yahoo, Hotmail, etc)

2. Internet Explorer v5 and above Web browser (Netscape browser gives unpredicatable problems unfortunately)
   - You will need to know if you have a web server proxy gateway or your network goes straight out to the Internet for web content.

3. Windows Media Player v6 and above plugin to IE5.x browser (one day we will supply real.com streaming, MPEG formats, .ram, .au, formats etc.
   - You will need to know if your network blocks streaming video and who to contact if that happens.

4. FTP software (eg. WSFTP, Leech etc some of which are freeware)
   - You need this to download some software, or download some course material faster.

4) Computer Literacy

1. Windows operating system, directory navigation, copy and delete files, saving files, renaming files, drag and drop, click, right click, double-click, popdown menus, etc.

2. Windows Networking, configure your network drivers for DHCP, winipcfg to find your IP address, configuring DNS server for resolving internet addresses, Domain names, Run a traceroute command, ping an address to find out if that link is alive, etc.

3. Email software, post email, receive and read email, cc email, send plain text messages, etc

4. Web software, key in web addresses, search engines eg. www.google.com, understand URLs (web addresses), configure web browsers for Proxy access, web navigation, resizing windows and frames, open frame in another window, fill in web forms and click submit, click on check buttons, key in userid and passwords etc.

5. Windows Media Player software, configure your access, proxy access, adjust volume, right click for statistics, properties, etc.

6. Understand the netiquette of what is acceptable behaviour and etiquette while you are online.

S* Courses require certain software applications and certain computer platforms before a Course Participant can enjoy the full range of the course experience. All registrants are therefore required to run through the above Technical Pre-Requisites Check List. As Bioinformatics is an IT-based course, it is not unreasonable to expect Course Participants to have basic IT skills and basic IT facilities in order to be able to participate.