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So welcome to week two of the horse course.
In these welcome videos I just kind of like to do a wrap up of week one and
then move into week two and, you know,
the response to this class has just been phenomenal.
Through the week I've noticed the enrollment numbers continue to go up.
We're almost 11 thousand horse, donkey,
equine enthusiasts enrolled in this class so.
It's been pretty fantastic to see.
And one of the things I'm, I'm really
loving about this course is to wake up every
morning, go to the discussion boards and I see,
welcome to the horse course from Mustafa from Sudan.
So, Mustafa, welcome, that was, it made my day just to read
that and to realize, you know, not only the reach of this course.
But that there are equine enthusiasts, you know,
in every corner of the world it's just, it's
amazing, and it's, it's really fun to, to watch
and read the students as you all interact together.
So it's been pretty, pretty exciting week.
Been some, some really good discussion threads this week
on you know, the evolution of the horse, and
what really drove them from going from those four
to three to, to single digit toes to the hoof.
You know, you can go back and read those, but as we go into week two,
you know, if you haven't been participating in
discussion boards I encourage you to jump in there.
It's, it's really fantastic.
And to see the interaction between all the students is great.
Even Emily Carter had a wonderful post this
week you know, she was kind of talking about the
history of the horse and then it kind of
morphed into this discussion of therapeutic use of horses.
If you don't know a lot about therapeutic riding
or therapeutic use of horses, just very briefly, you
know they're finding that people that you know either
have some you know, emotional trauma or even physical disabilities.
If, if they get involved with riding horses physically they improve because
when you ride you use different muscles that you normally don't use.
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Some other things I learned this week.
I've learned more about pony's than, than I have ever before.
the, the, the most important thing to remember
is, there's no such thing as an Icelandic pony.
Martin from, from, I believe Iceland, brought that up in the discussion boards.
In Iceland, you call them Icelandic horses, you do not call them ponies.
If you call them ponies, they're going to throw you off
the ca, their, their big island so don't do that.
So I thought that was pretty fantastic.
And, the, the post of the week has to go to Silke that posted about, unicorns
creating unicorns by, you know, mixing the chromosomes
of rhino's and horses since they're close relatives.
I thought that was pretty humorous and a lot of other folks did too.
So, so going into week two, this week
we're going to to be talking about basic anatomy.
We're going to jump into hoof anatomy, and hoof care, and
then round out the week with coat color and markings.
Now, don't forget, you know, to take the quiz.
Again, the quiz hard dates is the last day in the course.
So if you do fall a little bit behind on
that, do not worry, you have time to take those.
But we do start the, the hard close dates for the weekly assignments.
So there is the, this week is the hoof care plan.
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I did do a brief video introducing that to you, so you can kind of see what
the expectations would be with that, so watch
that video if you plan on doing the assignments.
And there is a hard due date.
So, so check those dates.
To make sure you, you do turn those in because we're doing
the period vows so we had to kind of, keep hard dates with that.
But other than that, I'm going to be checking in with you each week.
I'm, I'm, I'm jumping in discussion boards when I can and, and
I really enjoy the interactions and, and the feedback from the course.
So, I'll check in with you next week and I'll see you then.
[BLANK_AUDIO]
Chris J. Mortensen, Ph.D.Professor
