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Online students – Summer 2008
Summer 2008 online students:
Greetings! I am really looking forward to teaching you this semester. Please read through this message carefully all the way to the end (where you will see my name).We will be using Blackboard, an online learning system, for your online course; most students find it very easy to use. (I know that many of you are already familiar with Blackboard because it is used in many college courses.) If you are already registered in one of my online classes, you will have access to our specific class Blackboard site on Friday, June 20 (to get the syllabus, schedule, etc.). Please note, however, that the Blackboard system is scheduled to be upgraded on Saturday, June 21, and Sunday, June 22, so you may not be able to access Blackboard during those two days. If you join my online classes after that weekend, you will be able to get access to our Blackboard site within a couple of hours after you officially register for the course. Make sure you go to our class Blackboard site as soon as the semester begins so you don’t get behind in the
class assignments.To access our class information on Blackboard on or after Friday, June 20, registered students should go to http://www.palomar.edu/pconline, click on the red oval LOGIN button on the left side of the page, and then follow the directions from there. If you successfully log in, you will eventually come to a screen that says Welcome, (student’s name). There will be three boxes underneath the welcoming note. The box on the left should be labeled Tools, the middle one should be labeled My Announcements, and the one on the right should be labeled My Courses. Click on the name of our course in the My Courses box. (If you go to Blackboard before Friday, June 20, you may be able to log into Blackboard, but you won’t be able to access our online course. It will not yet be activated.) After you have successfully clicked on the name of our course, you will eventually see purple rectangles on the left side of the page (they have titles such as Documents/FAQs, Discussion Board, Videos, etc., and it may take a while for them to appear.) You will also see an announcement (message) from me on the right side. Read the announcement for further instructions and information about the class.
Important note: This course will require you to come on the main Palomar campus at San Marcos to take three tests during the semester (you will have to bring along a photo ID). Please note that I will not make any exceptions to this policy of taking tests on campus, even if you live outside of San Diego
County or are in the military. You will take the tests at the Tutoring Center in the library. You will have a choice of at least five different dates to come in to take each test. (Unfortunately, the tests must be taken during daytime hours as the Tutoring Center does not have evening or weekend hours during the summer.) In addition to the tests that you will take on campus, there will be quizzes that you will take online (one covers the assigned videos; the others cover reading in the packet of articles). You will have to take the online quizzes in a certain order and each quiz will only be online for a limited number of days (usually three days). You will also have a writing assignment to do: Either you will write a paper (a reflection on the videos you will watch online) or you will do Discussion Board assignments throughout the semester. I will explain how to take online quizzes and how to post to the Discussion Board at the orientation on campus.If you are already registered in my class AND have already taken an online class that used Blackboard, you aren’t required to come to the orientation on campus on Monday, June 23, but you MUST email me on Friday, June 20; Saturday, June 21; or Sunday, June 22, at professorlesyna@aol.com to let me know that you are still planning on being in the class and that you won't be coming to the orientation. (Do not email me before those dates to tell me you aren’t coming to the orientation.) Just write something like: “I am enrolled in your class, but will not be attending the orientation because I am familiar with Blackboard.” Please sign your complete name to the email and identify the name of your class and the five-digit class number (for example: Maria Gonzalez, Introduction to Sociology, 50527, or Maria Gonzalez, Social Problems, 50419). It’s extremely important that you include that five-digit class number in this email and in every email that you send to me throughout the semester. (Please note that your five-digit class number may be different from the one I used in the example above.) If you don’t email me on one of those three days or show up at the orientation on Monday, June 23, you are in danger of being dropped from the class to make room for crashers who show up at orientation. Please note that when I get your email about not coming to the orientation, I will send an email back to you that says “I got your email” so you will know that I got it. You will get that return email by Monday morning, June 23, at 10:00am.
If you are registered in the course and decide to drop it for whatever reason, please do so officially as soon as possible because there are almost always people on the wait list before the semester begins and people who will try to crash the course after the official start of the semester. As soon as one student officially drops, I can let another student into the course.
If you are not yet registered in the class: If the class is closed when you try to register because it has reached its registration limit, you should place your name on the official waitlist if the waitlist is still open. If a spot in the class then becomes available (because an enrolled student decides to drop the class), you would automatically be enrolled in the class. (Make sure you check your schedule online periodically to see if a spot became available and you were moved in.) Please note that waitlisting ends four days BEFORE the beginning of classes on campus; that means that if your name is still on the wait list after that point, you will NOT be moved into the class automatically even if someone later drops the class; you would need to come to the orientation to crash the class just like all the other students wanting to enroll. (The advantage of your having been on the official waitlist when you come to the orientation is that I will put your name at the top of the crash list that I use at orientation.) Please note that if you never got on the official waitlist and are trying to crash one of my online classes, you should come to the orientation on campus on Monday, June 23. If you don’t come to the orientation, the crashers who do show up will have priority over you with regard to being allowed to enroll in the class if there are any available spots. For your information, every semester that I have taught online there have always been at least a few available spots for crashers; during a few semesters, there have been more than five spots available for crashers.
It is extremely important that you have reliable Internet access if you are taking my online classes. If you don’t have access to a computer with reliable Internet access at home, or if your Internet access at home is temporarily unavailable at some point during the semester, there are computers available on campus for your use. (Local libraries also usually have computers available to use.) It is your responsibility to have access to a reliable computer with reliable Internet access at all times during the semester.
I recommend that you don’t take both of my online classes (Introduction to Sociology and Social Problems) at the same time, though of course this is your choice. The deadlines for taking tests and quizzes and doing Discussion Board assignments are almost always the same for both classes, which could be inconvenient or frustrating for you.
If you are in one of my Introduction to Sociology online classes: The orientation is from 10:00-11:00am on Monday, June 23, in room LL-109. There are two textbooks for this online class: Society: The Basics (9th ed.) by John J. Macionis and a packet of articles that I put together. The main textbook (Society: The Basics) is published by Pearson Education, Inc. (Prentice-Hall) and the copyright is 2007. The packet is published bv Montezuma Publishing, and the copyright is 2007. Make sure you buy the packet for this particular class and not the packet for my Social Problems class. Both the main textbook (by Macionis) and the packet of articles will be available at the campus bookstore on May 27. It is important that you have the correct editions of both textbooks. If you go to the bookstore and they tell you a textbook is sold out, you should immediately tell them to order you a copy as it can take some time to get additional copies sent to the bookstore. The danger of waiting too long to get the textbooks is that you may end up facing the first test or quiz without having the reading material you will need. (If you are not also taking my Social Problems class, skip the next paragraph and then continue reading.)
If you are in one of my Social Problems online classes: The orientation is from 11:00am-12:00pm on Monday, June 23, in room LL-109. There are two textbooks for this online class: Understanding Social Problems (6th edition) by Linda A. Mooney, David Knox, and Caroline Schacht and a packet of articles that I put together. The main textbook (Understanding Social Problems) is published by Wadsworth, and the copyright year is 2009. The packet is published by Montezuma Publishing, and the copyright should be 2007; make sure you buy the packet for this particular class and not the packet for my Introduction to Sociology class. Both the main textbook and the packet of articles will be available at the campus bookstore on May 27. It is important that you have the correct editions of both textbooks. If you go to the bookstore and they tell you a textbook is sold out, you should immediately tell them to order you a copy as it can take some time to get additional copies sent to the bookstore. The danger of waiting too long to get the textbooks is that you may end up facing the first test or quiz without having the reading material you will need.
If you have never taken an online class before, I strongly suggest you take a look at the following information (titled “Are you ready to be an online student?”) to help you figure out if you would do well in an online course: http://www.palomar.edu/areyouready
If you need to contact me before the beginning of the semester about anything that is not covered above, please contact me at professorlesyna@aol.com on or after Saturday, June 21. (All student emails throughout the summer should be sent to this email address.) However, please note that I do not make course materials such as the syllabus, schedule, etc., available to students before the start of the new semester.
I hope you have a great semester!
Professor Kalyna Lesyna