 Greetings and welcome to the Introduction to Astronomy and Physical Science. The purpose of this video is to walk you through the way the courses are set up. So I will walk you through a sample course of one of my classes and they are all very similar. So when you log in through Brightspace you will find something like this on the home page and you will show your courses there. There are a number of different ways to organize your courses if you like. They are already set up by semesters so you can see the semester that you may be taking the class. And when you're in that one this will show you all classes available for that semester. And that is one way to organize them. You can also of course look at all of your classes which isn't very useful especially if you've taken a lot of classes here. And you can look at the classes for which you are enrolled. And you can also pin classes using the little pin icon within it. And that is useful in that it will show you the classes. When you click on this little icon up at the top which has the nine little squares which will show you all of your classes. But anything that you've pinned will be shown up at the top. So you can see those classes here that I happen to have pinned right now that you can then access. So it's a couple of different ways that you can use to be able to access your classes. So semester is a good way to do it but you can also pin certain classes if you want to be able to have quick access to them. Now we're going to take a look at one course in particular. So some of the things may be different for the specific class that you happen to be taking. But when you log into one of my classes what you will see is the information at the top which tells you about the class. You will see the navigation bar here that you can use to navigate the class. Some icons for things like mail and announcements up at the top. And as I mentioned this is a way to quickly access to go from one class to another that if you're in one of your classes and want to quickly switch to another if you have them pinned then you can just click on this and you can quickly jump to another one of your pinned classes or other classes as you scroll through those. Now within the class the navigation bar is what you need to really get around in my class. There are a couple of buttons course home will take you back here where you start out. The content button contains all of the information you need for the class with the exception of the grades. So your grades are accessed through a separate icon and then things like the communications will open up other links that you can see for things like chat and email. Now you may note that when I show you these, there's a few things that won't show up in yours. Some of these are specifically for the instructor. So you won't see everything. For example, when you click on general links, there's a lot of things for course builder and editing the course that won't show up for you. But you will be able to see links to all of the discussions, drop boxes, and rubrics, etc. that you can use as well. So as we go through these are the main things that you really need to use for the class. I also give a banner at the top of the class here, which shows what lesson and topic we're currently studying. If there's more than one lesson for the current week, it will show that for you. So that is updated constantly. And then you'll want to watch the news. That's where I post any important announcements for the class. And the updates will tell you about upcoming quizzes, upcoming assignments that are due. And you'll want to look at, you can keep an eye on that. It will tell you if there are unread discussion board postings. And you can go through and set that up how you like. In this case, I have no updates for this one, but you may see things in there, which will give you reminders of what's coming due. And then of course, there's the calendar showing you the current date and any upcoming events that would be important there. So when we go through this, what you really need to do to access the course is to use the content button, the content button will take you through the content for the course. And this will take you to the content navigator. And when that loads here, what you'll get is a table of contents here. Now when you first log into your course, you won't see all of this. And in fact, when you first log in, all you're going to see are the first two items here. There's an introduction and syllabus information and a practice lesson. The lessons will not appear until later until they actually start. So when you first log in, you won't necessarily be able to see all of those. But this is the way you can navigate through all of the content. And within each of these modules, it contains all of the information that you need. So if we look, for example, at the syllabus and introduction and syllabus module, when we click on that and open that up, then we will see all the information there. You will see the course, syllabus, other contacts, anything, any other information that you need that would be useful for the class. So there's different information on different types of assignments that you may want to look at. At the end of this, you will see the syllabus checklist. That just verifies course policies. So once you go through and have read the syllabus and reviewed this and reviewed the checklist, you do need to go into that checklist and mark off all of the different policies. Once you do that, the first lesson will become available for you. So you'll then be able to see lesson one and be able to access the materials within it. So I'm going to go through and show lesson one as just an example of what would be covered in the class in a given lesson and how to navigate that. So when you click on lesson one, you'll see that I break it down into three parts. There are lecture materials, discussions, and assignments. So lecture materials include just that. There's a folder here with the textbook readings, which links directly to the textbooks that you need. There's a set of the lecture slides that you can use that will link to the lecture slides if you want to follow along. There's a folder with links to my video lectures and some review materials and review games that you can use to help reinforce your learning of that chapter. So this will cover any chapter or chapters that are covered within that lesson. And this is the same from lesson to lesson. If you go into lesson two, it will have exactly the same things we see here except for lesson two. So it'll be covering the next chapter or chapters. Now then I have a set for discussions. So if we look at the discussion section down here, I break the discussions down into various different areas. So there will always be a set of miscellaneous discussions for various things that you may use. There are class help discussions where you can ask questions of me or your classmates if you're having difficulty with an assignment. And there are graded discussions. And we'll look at this in a little bit more detail. These actually contain the graded discussions that are assigned. And for my astronomy classes, there is a photo of the day discussion where we look at a specific astronomy website and talk about a picture that is shown on it each week. Now when we look at the graded discussions, let's go in that in a little bit more detail. And when you click on that, there is a graded discussion and there will be a prompt here for you to see. Now you'll see in my case, there's actually three prompts because I use various different discussions for each discussion, graded discussions. So they may change from year to year. When you go in, you're only gonna see one of them. So I hide the other two so as not to confuse you. So you know which one to do. The discussion topic itself gives you the specific requirements for all discussions. And the prompt that you need and any links that you need are given in the discussion prompt. Just click on that. It will open up and you can then review what you need to talk about or do for this specific discussion. In my astronomy classes, we also have a semester long observing discussion which is here and is broken up just the same. This one is visible for the entire semester. So you will see it in each lesson if you're in one of my astronomy classes and you will see the specific discussion prompt that applies to the term when you are taking that. So if you're taking it in winter, you'll just see winter. If you're taking it in fall, you'll see fall. And if you're taking it in summer, you will see summer. So it just depends on when you happen to be taking the class and that explains the more details as to what to get you started on the observation. And again, the requirements are within the discussion posting itself. Now for assignments, when we look at the assignment section, that is where any other assignments that are not discussions will be present. So when we look at that, in this case for assignments, there is a lab for this lesson and the information for that lab is given to you here. It may be broken down into different parts. So in this case, there's a video explaining the lab for you which you may find useful to go through and watch before doing the lab. There's a drop box where you will submit the lab when you're done. This is the assignment sheet with printed instructions for the lab and this is the answer sheet which you will fill out and then return. So you'll take the answer sheet, fill that in and submit it to the drop box by the date that it is due. Now you'll notice that any drop box has three dates. There's a start date which is the first day you can access the materials there. There is a due date when the assignment is due for full credit and there is an end date after which I no longer accept submissions at all. So the due date is the one you really want to watch because that is when you have to have the assignment in for full credit. In this case, there also happens to be a discussion board associated with this lab that you'll need to post to and an answer sheet that will appear after the lab has been due and you have submitted the lab. So you can actually have access to the answers to review your answers and I may refer it back to some of those when we're grading this. Now also, you may see some other things here and there will be an extra credit section of each lesson. So there should be extra credit, a little bit of an example and in that case, we'll see the review quizzes which are partially extra credit as we talk about in the syllabus and there may be another extra credit assignment or assignments that you can access as well and you go through those just as you would any other assignment. So you can click on the folder there which will open it up and it will give you the assignment sheet here that you need to read with the instructions and then a place to submit your submission. And again, the due dates and dates are exactly the same. There's a start date before which you cannot submit it. There's a date that it is due and there is an end date after which you cannot receive any credit for it and at that point, the drop box is gone and will no longer be accessible to you. So it will no longer take submissions after that date and time. Now, this structure is the same for every single lesson. So if you go into lesson two, for example, you will see the same structure in my classes and lesson two will have again the same lecture materials, links to the discussions and links to any assignments for that unit. You'll note that everything that you need for the class is here. The whole idea is I don't want you having to search around to find where to do anything. All you need to do is use that content button and that will then take you to everything that you possibly could need for the lesson. So this is the key for the class and the key for the navigation of the class. So you will do that, you will need that button the most. And then of course, if you want to review your grades, you would click on the grades button and that will take you to the grade book and will show you all of your current grades for the class. And if we take a look at that here, again, it will just show, you'll see something similar to this and of course in this case there's no class here so I don't have anything to show directly but your grades would then show up there for any of the assignments that you have completed. So really those are the two key buttons that you need to use. The other things that are useful would be of course the email if you wish to email me from within the class, the email link up there and this notification for announcements that you can follow as well. So between those, those will guide you through the entire class and each lesson will be exactly the same. So if you want to finish lesson one, when lesson two is available, you'll be able to access the materials for lesson two and continue to move on with the class. So each lesson, again, will be exactly the same so you don't need to get used to anything different. Everything will stay exactly the same from lesson one through lesson 14. The structures will be exactly the same. Just make sure you're using that content button and at the end there is a checklist for each lesson that will allow you to review any materials that we'll do so it'll give you a reminder as an example of what was due here and this says what chapters you should have read, what videos you should have watched, what graded assignments you should have been done and what ungraded assignments, what things maybe you should be working on over the course of the semester so what you should have been doing this week and it's a good checklist, a good way to remind yourself did I get everything done for this week? Did I miss anything? Well, this will tell you did you do your review quiz? So if you didn't do the review quiz then it's a reminder to go back and take a look at that and make sure you do that before the assignments are due. So that finishes up this video walkthrough showing you how to access the course. As always, feel free to email me if there are any questions or concerns as you get started with the class. I am more than happy to assist you and I will also be more than happy to set up, for example, a Zoom session where we can sit down and go through the class and help you get started if you are having any difficulty. So until next time, have a great day everyone and I will see you in class.