 Hello there, my name is Wendy Briggs and if you're watching this thing, you're probably here to get into the summer online general biology course. I'm recording this video to welcome you to the class, but before I welcome you and tell you how excited I am for you to take this class with me this summer, I want to try to convince you to drop this class. Let me give it to you straight. I'm asking you to drop this class, not because I think it's lame or I don't want to teach it, or something else. I'm asking you to drop this class because it's really hard. And I think there is a general misconception in the world of education amongst students that online classes are usually easier than face-to-face classes. So I want to assure you that this online general biology course with a laboratory component is not easier than the face-to-face course. In fact, because you do not have access to peers, like in real time sitting next to you doing the work or talking about the content, or me in real time sitting next to you as you do the work or work through the content, the load on you is higher than it would be in a face-to-face course. We're offering two sections of general bio right now. There are spots available. So if you have any hesitation about the workload associated with biology in general, I don't know that I recommend doing the online scene. Let me just make my case a little bit stronger. We've been teaching this class. This is going to be our third time running this class. And I want to give you some numbers. And I'm giving you these numbers as sort of a, I don't know, shall we say wake up call? Because I ain't messing around, dogs. When we first offered the course over a year ago, we started out with 34 students enrolled. We, at Census, with our first group of students at Census. So this isn't even before we've had an exam. We had 18 at Census. At exam number one, dude, seriously? Oh, no, no, no, no. We had 22, 22 at Census. At exam one, we had 18. At exam two, we had 15. At exam three, we had 13. At exam four, we had 11. And 11 took the final exam. And 11 passed the class. Okay. That is from a teacher perspective like horrible. And so we made a few adjustments the following semester. We added an epic peer leader. And you are super stoked because we have Caesar, who was our epic peer leader in fall 17. He's also going to be doing our summer session. And I am absolutely convinced that Caesar's role in the class offering support and study sessions and answering questions. I'm very convinced that he's partially responsible for this change in numbers. At the start of the class in fall 17, we again started with 34. I actually have 34 humans enrolled in the class right now. I have another eight on the wait list and more like begging me to let them in. So we've got our 34 to start with already. We'll see. I'm going to hope that some of you go, ah, online, not for me. And we probably won't keep our 34. But in fall 17 with Caesar, we had 34 start at census, we had 26. At exam number one, we had 26. At exam number two, we had 26. At exam number three, we had 25. And we kept our 25 the whole time and we had 23 pass. Dude, seriously? One of the biggest things that changed is that I did this video for that group. And so there wasn't any confusion about how difficult the course was going to be. And again, I said it already, but dude, adding Caesar into the mix was huge. So heart to heart, I want summer version. We haven't done it in the summer yet. Let me throw this at you. Both these sessions were 16 weeks. Summer, we're doing the whole thing in eight weeks. And I'm telling you right now, the last previous students I think in the fall 17 group, I'm like, dudes, what do you think? Should I do this in the summer? And they're like, no. Like they were totally having trauma around the idea of doing the work in eight weeks. This is another reason to really look at your life. It, for eight weeks, like you really are going to be living the class. Let me just show you. This is the calendar that I've set up. And I'm pretty sure that this is my, yeah, it is my updated version. Everything that's colored, every colored day, is you have something do in Canvas. Now look at this. Dudes, Saturday, something is due in Canvas. Sunday, something's due in Canvas. We're doing things in Canvas every single day. Things are due in Canvas every single day. I went through the schedule of all the things that we have to get done in order to ensure that this course is equivalent to our face-to-face courses during the regular semester and our online course during the regular semester. So we have to fit all this stuff in here. I could have combined days to make it look like there were free days, and I decided not to do that because I don't want you to be misled. Like, even if there is a free day, which if you look during week three, I gave you a bonus study day, like Merry Christmas, that's a gift. Those things, like, look, there's three. And in fact, that might be it. Oh no, we have a holiday. That's awesome. But that's it. There are three days where there is not, three days in a holiday where there's not something to do in this class. Things that are due are mostly discussion boards. Your labs, every time you have a lab, you have to do a lab write-up in a lab notebook. I'm going to explain that in a second. Every lecture, you have to participate in a discussion forum. And then every week we've got quizzes. You're going to have to record your own videos. I'm telling you, you can do things early. So if you wanted to do lab five on the day that you take exam one, like, awesome, that's great, like, move things around so that you can structure your life. But let me just show you what I did with my little calendar. I printed out my version of this calendar, and I have all my notes on there of like, these are the things that I have to do on these days. I tried to make that for you in this schedule so that you could see everything that must get done. But the whole point of this is to tell you, this class is not for the weak at heart, and it's not for the strong at heart if you don't have time in your life to dedicate to it. I know how motivated a lot of you are, and I'm like blown away inspired by the humans who take on this challenge and do really well and make it through. So I'm confident that it can be done, but make sure that you are thinking about that before you do it. If you have any questions or specific you want me to weigh in on your specific situation, give me a hala hala, and I will absolutely happily let you know if I think that your situation is doable. And like I said, right now there's a bunch of spots available in the face-to-face class. Dude, take it, it's the exact same class without the online piece of it. All right, if you're in, I'm going to record a whole bunch more stuff explaining. What up?