Welcome to the thousands of students from over 130 different countries that are registered for this class. It makes me so excited to be able to present this information to so many people from around the world. I'm Dr. Chris Mortensen, and this is the welcome video to the, the welcome video to the horse course and. Here I am standing in the Florida museum of Natural History, here on the UF campus and it's just an amazing place. That and, and we're so fortunate to be able to have this on campus. And I thought, what a perfect setting for the first week of the course. Especially as we talk about the history and evolution of horses and donkeys and zebras and the other equids. Behind me is a if you don't recognize it, that's a Columbian mammoth. And, and it was found in North America and they went extinct about 10,000 years ago. And that's about when horses were ejected from North America as you'll find out this week. So the purpose really of this video is to kind of talk about the course, the syllabus kind of go over some of the objectives. You'll know each week we, you're going to notice there's about 60 to 90 minutes worth of video. Some of the videos go longer than 15 minutes, and, and generally those are, are, lectures that are really, really important information. Not to say not all of it is, but that's tend to, that's why they tended to go a little bit longer, and I chose not to reshoot them because you know, that's very, very important information. So watch those videos at your leisure, and then if you're, you're interested in earning a statement of accomplishment or a statement of accomplishment with distinction, you will be asked to, to take each weekly quiz, which is only ten, it's ten points, ten questions, multiple choice, so not, I, not purposely built to be very, very rigorous. And then beginning next week, we're going to ask you to start turning in weekly assignments and there's four weekly assignments and the goal of you know, creating those assignments is for you to apply the information that's presented to you in the, in the lectures to an actual animal. So either one you own or a hypothetical animal. But the idea is to get you thinking about the management and the information presented to you and applying that to, to horse or donkey care. So also we're going to ask that you evaluate three of your peers if you do turn in your, your weekly assignment. And you have to really think about it with, with thousands and thousands of students from around the world. That's the only feasible way we can grade or evaluate your work is, is through peer eval, so, I know through some other Coursera courses is not the most popular option, but really that's the only way we can do it. But I'll be, you know, obviously throughout the course, I'll be monitoring that and, and, and making sure people are fair to each other. So, in addition to you know, quizzes and weekly assignments. We also, we are also going to provide weekly gaming activities to help prepare you for the quizzes. I’ve gone in and, and created some, some online games and some app games that you can actually do on your own. That’s going to reinforce the material. They should be fun, you know some of them are like battleship or jeopardy or. Some you know, Who Wants to be a Millionaire type games that you have to answer questions relating to the course. So those will be provided to you, you know, to, to, to practice and to have fun with, and then also I highly, highly encourage you to participate in the discussion boards. You know, get to know your other students I mean we have people from all over the world so you know, obviously people down in Australia or in Asia or in Africa or South America. You know, we all manage horses a little bit differently or donkeys a little bit differently, so share your experiences you know, what works for you, and all I ask is that you're respectful for everybody's opinions. You know, be, be respectful to each other on the discussion boards. Now, I'm going to monitor the class, throughout the next six weeks, and I'll be checking in with you with a video, you know, each week, you know, kind of addressing some of the hot button issues that, that people brought up in the discussion boards. And, kind of introduce you to that week's material. So, so I really look forward to this class, I'm so excited to, to get going and I'll, I'll see you next week.
