 Hi, I'm Salvatore Bobonis and in this short video I'll just be going over the Unitive Study Outline for Sociology 2000 Global Social Problems. If you know anyone who's taken the class in previous years, the class will be pretty similar to what it was in 2016 and 2017, but there are some updates and it's worth having listened to the description. So here is the website for the Unitive Study Outline and you'll find a link to it eventually in the Class Blackboard site. I will send an email out with a PDF of the Unitive Study Outline for anyone who's already enrolled in the class at time of filming here. I am the Unit Coordinator, Associate Professor Salvatore Bobonis, and you can reach me here at SalvatoreBonis at Sydney.edu.au. I have many email addresses. You'll also get email from me, S, at SalvatoreBonis.com. I have two or three other addresses. I promise all of your email that you send to any of my active addresses will eventually come to me. What I don't suggest you do is call me. I do have an official phone in my office, but the voicemail can't be accessed from home and I'm rarely sitting there waiting for a phone call in my office. So if you want an appointment, if you want to talk to me, if you'd like feedback, email me. You'll get a response right away. I usually respond to email within minutes or hours and never more than 24 hours delay even if I'm traveling on the other side of the world. So best to reach me by email. No need to double or triple email me. Just get me at the most convenient email address for you. The unit takes a multidisciplinary approach to the study of major global social problems. Lectures, readings and activities will examine these problems through the multiple lenses of comparative sociology, systems engineering, climate science, human rights discourses, world history, and literature. And I mean that. In this class, we're not doing a lot of heavy sociological theory and applying it to social problems. Instead, I'd like to reach out and embrace the idea that many different perspectives are necessary for understanding the problems that challenge the world today. I myself do a lot of popular writing on global problems. And by popular, I don't mean people actually read it. By popular, I mean I'm engaging in debates with experts and professionals from all sorts of different fields. And when you engage in the larger public debate about global social problems, you can't just say, I'm a sociologist and here's the sociology answer. Because maybe an epidemiologist has an answer to and you know, a lawyer has an answer to and a business person has an answer. What we'd like to do in this class is bring together those multiple perspectives into a more holistic understanding of the problems that face the world today and how we can address them. This is a 12 credit point unit. And as you will see, we have two weeks, two hours a week of online lecture, one hour a week of online tutorial. Now the online lectures are nominally and I stress nominally on Mondays from two to four PM. What that means is that by two PM on Monday, every week, I will have posted that week's lectures. So if you were to go to the class blackboard site Monday at two PM, you'd find everything there for the week ready to go. And my expectation is that you will access the lectures on Monday, watch them on Monday. You don't have to do it at two PM. To be honest, lectures will always be up before Monday morning. They'll go up Sunday night at the latest. But sometime on Monday, you should watch the lecture material in preparation for tutorial. Now you'll see that the tutorials are on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. If you have a Tuesday tutorial, you should definitely have watched all the lecture material before tutorial. That means Monday night worth a very latest Tuesday morning. Of course, if you have a Thursday tutorial, you can get away with watching the lectures on Wednesday and that won't be a problem. But you're definitely expected to watch the lectures and do the lecture readings before you come, quote unquote, to your tutorial session. Now the tutorials will be held online using Adobe Connect software. Adobe Connect is a video conferencing software system. I have to admit, it's a bit clunky. It sometimes gets slow or locks up. But it is the software that the university is paying good money for us to be able to use. And so even though other systems might sometimes be smoother and easier to use, we're going to use Adobe Connect because that's the official university system. In these tutorials, you'll be broken up into tutorial teams of, well, ideally not more than six students. They might overload a seventh student occasionally in a tutorial. But ideally, your tutorial will have five or six students in it. From your perspective as a student in this class, you'll never know how many students are in the class. You'll only know that you're one of a five or six student tutorial team. And this is something that I'm really devoted to the idea that we should be using online tools to pull apart the teaching model. And instead of having big classes of 100 or 1000 students, we can use online tools in effect to have a class of six students. Now these online tutorials will actually be tutorial meetings at the time that you see here. So even though you don't have to watch the lecture Monday at 2 p.m., you can watch it anytime Monday or even on Tuesday morning or something, you do have to attend quote unquote that is get online and be in an online conference room. You have to attend the tutorial to which you are assigned. And no, you can't just go to another tutorial if you can't make yours that particular week. You're part of a team with five or six other people. I really can't have students dropping in and out of teams throughout the semester. And you'll find it's actually much more exciting and much more rewarding to work with a group of people whose names you actually know and who you see every week in your online video conference than it is to be in an anonymous 25 student classroom. So I hope you'll enjoy it. Past years students have really loved the tutorial team structure and I hope you will too. I'm going to skip over these learning outcomes. You can read what they are and see the check marks and then go to the bottom of the outline and see which graduate qualities A, B, C, D, E and F each of the learning outcomes pertains to. I think that's very silly and I'm just going to skip it. It is however required by the university. That's why it's there. Okay, our unit schedule. So here's the exciting part. The things we're going to study this semester. The first week is just going to be an introduction. It will be a full lecture but there are no tutorials. So it's just lecture material introducing to what we're doing this semester. And in fact, this video will be part of that week one lecture. But starting week two we're going to do some exciting stuff. We're going to jump right into development. And the first topic we're going to study is tutorial topic is the Me Too movement. The movement about fighting sexual harassment in the workplace. But instead of focusing on Hollywood celebrities and politicians, we're going to focus on sexual harassment among working women in the developing world. You know, a very different, much bigger social problem. Not that anybody's harassment is excusable. But when you compare the conditions in Hollywood to the conditions in a call center in India, I think we're talking a whole different scale of problem and certainly a whole different number of people involved. And I think it'll be very exciting to take what we're all learning from the reports that have been breaking over the past three months to take what we're learning and apply it to situations in the developing world. And throughout this semester we'll do about two weeks per topic. So the first two weeks of lecture will be on development and then tutorials will relate to those. So the first tutorial will be on Me Too. The second tutorial will be on famine conditions in the very poorest countries. You're probably aware or you might be aware that right now famine conditions are breaking out across the region of what's called the Horn of Africa, the region around South Sudan, Ethiopia, but also across into the Arabian Peninsula, so in Yemen. The famines in South Sudan and Yemen have very similar causes. And we're going to learn about the causes of famine in the poorest countries of the world and why it is that in 2018 we still have famine, hunger, starvation in the poorest countries in the world today. Then we'll have just one little extra lecture on the international data infrastructure. And that extra lecture is really meant to prepare you for your papers because it'll teach you how to access data, actual live data about the real world that we'll be using in our papers for this class. We'll then have a semester break. When we come back we'll do two weeks on refugees. We'll have a midterm exam covering the first half of the class. Then we'll do two weeks on nationalism, two weeks on inequality, and two weeks on the environment before we wrap up. And you can see there are some of the sorts of things we'll be doing for tutorials each week. There's an official statement about attendance, but I'll give you the practical statement about attendance. You have to watch the lecture materials do well on the exam. It's that simple. If you don't watch the lectures, you're probably not going to do very well on the exams. Tutorial attendance, look, if you're on a five or six student team, you're doing teamwork together, you know, you should show up and support your team. If you have to occasionally miss a tutorial, well that happens and it's not the end of the world. But I think you should shoot to attend at least 80% you at least eight out of 10 tutorials for the semester. Reading requirements, there's reading every week, but there's not any one book or any list of academic journal articles. Here's the deal I want to make with you. Instead of giving you a reading list of eight or 12 academic journal articles every week that let's face it no one's ever going to actually read, I'm going to give you just maybe two or three links to online articles. Online articles are usually, you know, 600 words or 800 words. These are really short reads, you have four or six minutes each, but I actually want you to read them. These are all going to be topical articles about the sorts of social problems we're studying. They're the sorts of things that if you're just flicking around on your phone, you might just flip through the articles and read them yourself, right? These are the sorts of articles that, you know, you would read for leisure anyway. And I'm going to assign some of the articles, but I'm also going to assign you to find articles on topics that we're studying and bring those to your tutorial team. So the readings will be, you know, really very much expected, but very easy for this class. Now, obviously only the readings that I assign will be on the examination, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't read more widely. And, you know, if you're taking a class like this on global social problems, I really hope that when I give you, you know, short news readings about global social problems that are happening today, that you'll just be motivated to read them on your own. Obviously this class is online, so it has major online components. Lecture recording is kind of irrelevant because all the lectures are online, so of course they're recorded. Now, what everyone wants to hear about the assessments. There are five assessment points for this unit. Now, I know that's more than for most units, and I'll be honest, that's a lot of work for me, but I believe strongly that students shouldn't have their entire grade determined by one or two big assessments. You know, students should have multiple forms of assessments, and they should be different types of assessments, so that students who are good at essays, you know, get to write an essay, but students who are good at, you know, multiple choice tests get to do multiple choice tests, students who are good at short answer get to do a short answer, students who are good at projects get a project, so it's a way to, like, reward people who are good at many different things instead of having one big high stakes essay that counts for everything. So what we have is a social problems report, not exactly an essay, but it is a 1500-word, let's say, document. It's actually going to be of the form of an online persuasive article where you try to offer a solution to a global social problem that interests you, and of course we'll get into more detail with that as the semester goes on, but it's a fun project. The idea is that you identify a global social problem. Let's say, you know, maybe you want to study hunger. You pick a country of interest, you might pick South Sudan, and then you write about the problem of hunger in South Sudan, and then compare it to the problem in two or three other countries. So you might compare South Sudan with Yemen and South Sudan with Ethiopia. They're both countries in the same region, they're both suffering the same kinds of problems, but Yemen, like South Sudan, is not solving its problem. Ethiopia, unlike South Sudan, is solving its problem, and so you might use, you know, the difference in these comparative cases to help shed light on what solutions you might have for the hunger problem in South Sudan, and then you'll propose a solution based on this information you have acquired, you know, knowledge you've acquired out in the world. If you do a really good essay and you want to actually publish it, I'll work with the best students, authors of the best essays to actually get them published in the real world, you know, online, so you can see your work out there in the world instead of it just being a class essay that no one ever reads. I've so far, I think, had two student essays actually published, and I'd love to have a lot more out there. Second, there are two exams. Both exams are the same format. One's a one hour exam, the midterm one's a two hour exam, the final. The exam is part multiple choice and part short answer. The midterm exam will have one short answer question, the final exam will have two short answer questions, and the midterm exam date is already set. That'll be done, both exams will be done via Blackboard. The final exam date has not been set because even though it's via Blackboard online, it'll be set at the time that is assigned to us by the examination's office, so I don't know the time at this point. We'll get a time from the exam's office. There'll also be a tutorial team project. I know a lot of students hate tutorial, hate team projects, but the fact is you're going to get to know your fellow teammates in your tutorials very well. This is a small project, it's only going to be 10% of your grade, so you know hopefully all the teams will do well. And in general, I've seen such really fantastic work from tutorial teams in the past that grades have been extraordinarily high on these projects because students have simply wowed me. They've vastly outperformed what they had to do simply because they're excited about the subject matter. So hopefully you'll be in a tutorial team where you guys will outperform just like my past teams have. There's also tutorial participation mark and again as long as you attend every week or most weeks, the structure of the class forces you to participate and because you're asked in the room to leave your own comments and your own thoughts on things and I go into these video conference rooms at the end of the week and check to see what you've written. So as long as you're actually there each week and contributing, you can get 90 or 100% on the tutorial participation mark pretty easily. That's not too difficult to accomplish. You can certainly get a distinction, 75 or above if you participate regularly. The multiple choice and short midterm exam include, I'm going to highlight this point here because it says important, include both multiple choice and short answer questions. Your total mark is two thirds from the multiple choice segment and one third from the short answer segment. The multiple choice questions are going to be graded on a rubric. Now I always have, it's always challenging to get Australian students to understand this but I just want to make an illustration. If you get 75% right on a multiple choice test in the United States or Canada or Singapore or you know anywhere in the world really give a lot of multiple choice tests, 75% would be considered a C. That's not a very good grade. We would consider that in Australia to be equivalent to a pass mark. Yet in Australia a 75% is distinction like that's great. Now I can't give a straightforward multiple choice test and have a 75% be distinction. Other departments like the Psychology Department at the University of Sydney get around this by giving you extraordinarily picky multiple choice tests where you're trying to trick into being, you're trying to be, I'm sorry, where they try to trick you into giving the wrong answer so that they can you know lower the grades somewhat. Now that's really poor testing practice. The best way to do the test is to ask simple straightforward questions. Did you watch the lecture? If so you know the answer to the question and based on those simple straightforward questions you get a percent right and then scale that to an actual mark. So for example on my test which is a very straightforward test if you get 75% of the multiple choice questions right that would be a pass mark of 60. If you get 90% right which in the US would be an A- you get a 75 which is a low distinction here in Australia. The flip side of having this scaling is that the questions are simple, direct, easy, you know, no tricks, no A and B, A or B, A, B and C, none of that sort of stuff. It's just question, four possible answers, in some cases five possible answers and one of them is simply correct. The other three or four are simply wrong. Another quirk based on good testing theory is that you can't profoundly fail a multiple choice test. Now you know in theory you could get a zero on a multiple choice test but that doesn't make any sense. No one gets a zero on an essay. So I set the minimum grade you know if you just completely bomb the test and you get a really bad score the worst you can do is 30% if you take the test. You know you shouldn't cheat. You have to sign some statement at the university saying you won't cheat. Look we all know you're not supposed to cheat. I'll leave it at that but it's here in the university study outline if you want to know exactly what is allowed and what cheating means. Obviously we'll ask you to do university study survey at the end of the class. How was feedback used from last year's survey to develop this unit of study? What I do is every year I ask students at the end of the class what sort of things would you like to see included and I try to include that. Also I've really reworked how the exams are done in response to student feedback. I added the short answer component on the exams in response to student feedback and believe me that's a lot more work grading exams if I have to grade everyone's short answer and not just multiple choice and I've also changed the tutorial structure and I've been really pushing the university to timetable the tutorials and they finally did that for this semester so I'm happy about that. So lots of improvements and every year this class is going to continue to improve the graduate qualities at the end and that will about do it for the unit of study outline. So thanks for listening. We'll get started with the class in week one that is on Monday, March 5th and I look forward to quote-unquote seeing you in class on the 5th. Thanks.