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Classes for 2018 - 2019
There are five offerings for the 2018 - 2019 season:
How Will Online University Courses Work? Step 1: If you want to reserve a space in a course, you can register on the shopping site where you can choose to pay in full or via subscription for the region you live in. After subscribing, email me at tricia@alum.mit.edu and send me your name, shipping address and preferred email address for the class correspondence (many paypal accounts are in husband's names or old addresses). Step 2: After we receive confirmation of the correct payments processing, we will send you the course kit to the address you used in step 1 as listed in the course descriptions. Some courses have the full kit sent and some courses have materials sent in installments. Usually the kits do not leave here until the course user/passwords have been sent. Postal fees are included in the course pricing for USA addresses. Please choose the correct region so the shipping supplement is added appropriately. All international kits are sent via First Class US Mail. If you desire US priority or Global Priority, please email for a quote. Step 3: The first day of the course, we will send you an email with your uniquely assigned username and password as well as the link to the restricted-access course page. It is best to use a minimum number of computers to access the course materials as the database will flag accounts with logins coming from a large numbers of IP-addresses, resulting in a temporary suspension of password while a new password is assigned. Step 4: The class content will be provided in two forms. The project instructions will be a PDF download per page to your hard-drive. For animations, they are presented in Flash. If you can see the moving animation on this page, you already have Flash installed. If you can't, the link to download and install the FREE Flash reader is here. If you register for the class, it is your responsibility to get the Flash reader installed. Refunds will not be given. As an additional warning, some users of satellite internet have trouble downloading the large files involved in the class as their provider will 'throttle' their use. Please check with your provider on their policy for large downloads. Step 5: Each month, when the new class content is loaded, you will receive an email with the link to the new lesson. The links to content posted in previous months will still be active and able to be printed or viewed for the entire period of the course. Step 6: A private NING social media site has been established for the Cabinet of Curiosities class to allow the students to have discussions with the teacher and each other as well as upload pictures of their projects in progress and designs for sharing and comment. An invitation to this private site will be sent with your class emails. A Note on Course Practicalities: There have been many concerns raised on ability to complete a lesson before the next is posted. These courses are at YOUR pace. Needlework shouldn't be stressful - it should be an enjoyable experience. In the extreme case, you can print the content and put it in the course kit and place it aside for a few years (I have done that myself with other online classes - set aside for when my kids are older). Maybe you just want to learn the stitches so you can apply them to some other project of yours. Go ahead and work the ones you are interested in on a doodle cloth and then onwards to a project of your choice. It is your choice to get what you want out of the content. I give you permission to never finish the project but enjoy the process and information for what it teaches. There are no requirements to send the completed project back to me (please don't). If your only experience for distance learning in the past was EGA correspondence courses and you enjoy the feedback - send me a picture or scan and ask questions, I will be happy to give you some feedback. The course material will be additive, meaning the new month will be added to the last. So you don't need to worry that you might miss getting the material off the site by a certain time each month. A few months after the course completion, we will send out an email letting you know when the course materials will be removed from the site, giving you time to print out anything you may have missed. For courses which include animations/movies, the complete set of animations will be sent to your address on CD Rom at the end of the course so you may have them for future reference. There have been instances where a few years after a course, a disaster has destroyed someone's printouts or CD. As long as a record exists of your taking the class - I will get you the information again! A Note on Course Sharing: In order to provide historic information and photography to enhance the course materials, Thistle Threads has needed to enter into licensing relationships with museums that require payment based on the number of views of the material. We are required to provide the institutions with print outs of the login files to establish use payments. If there is sharing of the login and passwords by students with non-students, then Thistle Threads will not be able to afford to work with the institutions for such access. Therefore, we have put a more sophisticated login system in place to enable us to track individual usage and to reassign login credentials if necessary to prevent unpaid use of the materials. It is for this reason that the materials are print-only from the website as well. We hope that you understand why these limitations have been put in place and appreciate that it is so we may bring a richer experience to the course by using extant materials to educate. This is new territory for most institutions and has taken significant negotiation to establish, we hope it will be a good experience for them and us so that we may expand such opportunities in the future. |
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