Skills and Requirements to Participate in an Online Course

You need to have basic technology skills and access to an Internet connection to take an online course.

Basic computer skills include the ability to:

1. Create and save documents
2. Manage and organize documents (files) and folders
3. Upload and download files
4. Send and receive email
5. Navigate to web sites using web addresses
6. Perform basic Web searches

If you do not have basic computer skills, we recommend you take an introductory computer course before attempting fully online courses.

Hardware and software required to use Blackboard, the NHCTC online learning platform, (http://www.nhctc.blackboard.com):

• An e-mail account is required. You will be provided with an CCSNH email account.

• Windows 95, 98, 2000, XP or VISTA or MacOSX(10)

• 1 Gigabyte RAM is highly recommended if you have the Windows VISTA operating system

• 1 Gigabyte of free disk space

• MS Office including

Word, PPT, Excel and Outlook is highly recommended and can be purchased at the academic price of about $130 at Staples or Best Buy.  Not all Staples stock academic version. Also, some courses require MS Access which may also be purchased at an academic price.

• Adobe Acrobat Reader http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep2.html (free download) Needed to view .pdf files

• Internet Explorer (http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/default.mspx)

(free download) version 6 or higher or

• Netscape ( http://browser.netscape.com/ns8/) (free download) version 4.78 or higher

• A 56K modem or high speed cable

• Virus protection

a)  Buy a copy of Norton SystemWorks
http://www.symantec.com/sabu/sysworks/basic/ or

b) Download Grisoft free anti-virus software at:
http://free.grisoft.com/freeweb.php/doc/1/

c)  Set to update virus definitions automatically

It is a small investment to avoid big computer problems such as a crashing hard drive and loss of all your files.