Welcome to the virtual classroom. I will be your teacher in this online experience. You will start with a lesson called Exobiology and continue through until you have covered all the topics in Astrobiology: The Living Universe.

Here are some tips to help you through your lessons and espescially the quizzes:

• Keep notes of things that you find interesting or things that you think are important. You can even do this on your computer by running a text editor like notepad.

• The quiz will be timed so you will want to keep your notes handy. And no, it is not cheating to look at your notes. I've just made the quizzes harder to compensate.

• Don't forget to follow links in lessons that take you to related content. Often they will provide much more detail and give you a better understanding of the specific topic.

Now it's almost time to start the first lesson. Before that, however, I will explain how the virtual classroom works. Each section of Astrobiology is covered in one lesson. The lessons are fairly succinct but you are encouraged to take as much time as you need to complete them. Also, lessons will be all on one page. Each lesson will have appropriate links to help you navigate through the lessons. After the lessons, a link will take you to the quiz for the lesson you just completed. The quiz will be timed so you may lose marks for going over the allowed time. The allowed time will be given to you before you begin the quiz. The quizzes will vary in length from lesson to lesson but will all be generally the same difficulty.

For all quizzes, you will be given a bonus based on the time you take to complete the quiz. You are given a 5% bonus at the beginning but it slowly decreases to 0% for 10 minutes. After the ten minutes are up, your bonus becomes a deduction and it gets larger and larger until you finish the quiz.

Note: The Virtual Classroom has been designed for student age 15 to 18. Students younger then this age may have difficulty with the quizzes at the end of each lesson.