 Greetings and welcome to this course orientation for popular culture in the U.S. I'm Lance Eaton, the instructor here at North Shore Community College and I'm really excited to teach this course. I find popular culture to be such a fascinating topic. I hope that you will too as you kind of go through the course and learn the different things that we are exploring in this course. So what is this course? It examines popular culture in its many forms in media. You have the opportunity to assess, explain and analyze products of popular culture by connecting them with the overall cultural values, norms and ideologies. We get to explore issues related to popular culture such as consumerism, mass media, technology, viewer participation, etc. And really through this course you become better communicators and interpreters of cultural products. And really it's just a very fascinating and intriguing course. That being said it's also a fairly rigorous course. People think popular culture is effusive, is irrelevant, but we take the topic very seriously here. We do have fun with it. But it does require you to think and analyze to a degree that you might not realize the course is intended to do. So you're going to be challenged in this course and you should be challenged in this course. This is your education. And like every other college course you should expect to spend nine to twelve hours a week of work on this course. Between the course lectures, the discussions, the different assignments. So one really great thing about this course is there's no textbook purchase required. All the readings are made available online in our course shell. And we do watch three films, which I don't require you to buy the films, but you do need to get a hold of them. You may be able to find them online or you can use them for in-library use at the Danvers campus. Those films are Tales from the Crypt, which is a documentary. It's not the TV show. Bamboozled, but I'm a cheerleader. So what do you do in this course? What are some of your assessments and activities? The first is introductory material. That's just material to get you up and started, get you into the course in oriented so that you can do the best throughout the semester. You do an article analysis, which is essentially a review of an academic article. You do discussions each week and we really have some fun, interesting prompts for you to consider and for you to play around with the course materials. You get to blog about popular culture. While we're running a course blog, you'll be able to interact with other students and potentially other people in the world who may be coming to look at what you're saying and what you're doing. Finally, we have what is popular culture project and this is a very fascinating and interesting project that we'll be doing in chunks throughout the semester. So announcements. Announcements really are an important piece of this course. Every time you log into the course, you really want to go to the announcements and see what's being updated. I send out a good amount of announcements. They're just things to be aware of, reminders, reflections on what we've been doing, clarifications about what's been said. So it's a really, really important place to go pretty constantly. You want to be, every time you go into the course, which should be a couple, four to five times a week, you should be going in and checking out the announcements. The course information section, this is everything you need to know about how to succeed in this course. The syllabus course outline, assignment guidelines, all of those things are there to really make sure that you have all the information so when it's time to do the assignments, when it's time to engage in the coursework, you know what is expected of you. The learning modules is where all the content is. Each week will be a different module and that module will have a set of things within them for you to kind of go through a different, you know, a set of information, a set of actions, activities, etc. Every week we have discussions and as I mentioned before, these will be really quirky, interesting, dynamic discussions. And then there's also an open discussion. Whenever you have, you know, you want to share something about popular culture, a new observation, a new understanding, that isn't related to that week's module and its theme. Then you can go to the open discussion and share that out and interact with other students around that. One big thing I really emphasize is that there, you know, you really want to succeed in this course. One of the things you need to do the first is just don't underestimate the course topic. It's an important topic. It's a powerful topic. It's a complex topic. We won't just be describing what Justin Bieber wore to the Emmys. It really is about trying to make sure we understand what goes on as we engage in popular culture. Remember the five rights, which is get the right assignment into the right place at the right time in the right format with the right editing. You really do want to make sure that you follow the directions. I try to make them clear. I try to lay them out so that you know what's expected of you. With all of your assignments, you really need to connect your thoughts to the course material. Popular culture is a very, very easy course to just shout out opinions all you want, but those opinions need to be grounded and based upon the course material. It's the only way I know that you're actually looking at thinking about and considering the material. Very, very important. Always ask questions. We're going to be seeing some interesting things. We're going to be seeing some confusing things. We deal with theory in this course. That's hard. If you need clarification, if you need help, please, we have a questions forum. Always, always, always ask questions. And on that forum, you can ask them anonymously. If you're afraid of how asking that question may look. Honestly, I love when students ask questions. It helps me to know that they need some help. It helps me to know that I'm not doing my job effectively and should do my best to clarify. And finally, plan for technological failure. It will always happen. This is a course that's entirely in a technological environment online. You really need to make sure you have those backups. Do you have a second computer that you could regularly access if your shuts down? Are you saving your assignments in different, you know, in more than one place? Are you emailing them to yourself? Really make sure you use or you plan for technological failure because it will happen. So each week, as you get into the module, there's a series of things you need. Each module, there's a series of things you need to do. Typically, modules include objectives and topics. My thoughts, the instructor's thoughts, an assignment listing, additional readings that maybe require supplemental, the discussion forum, your blog post prompt, and then the open discussion forum in any assignments that you might do that week. So you really want to get in there and for each module, you should, you know, read that module, those topics and objectives, read the learning guide, review the read, watch the course readings and videos, fully participate in the discussion, post the course blog, and then on the weeks that are relevant, submit reading selections for the next week and perform any additional assignments. If you're having technical help, you really want to reach out to the help desk at northshore.edu. If you have questions or problems with Blackboard, you want to reach out to Blackboard Learn Help Desk, which is BBlearn at northshore.edu. And if you have questions about the course, you really should be asking, you really should be reaching out to me or be using that questions forum. So you can reach out to me at leaton at northshore.edu or go to the questions forum. In terms of communicating with me, email is the best way. However, if you need to contact me by phone, you can contact me. I have my number up there. I will take texts. You just need to make sure you identify who you are, what class you're in and what your need is, and I'll happily respond. Typically expect about 24 hours turnaround time. It's usually less than that, but just, you know, that's the standard. And if I don't respond within 24 hours, then please send it again. And on the weekends, it might be, you might have to expect to wait a little bit longer. All right, first day of class, when you come into the course, you really should go into that module one, read all the material there, read all of the course information. You want to post your introduction to the Introduction Discussion Board or the module one discussion board. Post a comment on the questions forum, take the syllabus quiz. You have to get 100 for that in order to get credit. Activate your library account, upload the academic honesty assignment, register on the blog, post your first blog post, and look at what's coming up next week. It sounds like a tall order, but these are all the things that you're doing that first week. So the more of them that you can chip away at, the better you're set up to succeed in the class. So there's a lot of stuff that I just went over. I don't expect you to process it all right now. I do expect you to kind of keep coming back into this course during the first week, getting yourself oriented, getting the materials, understanding what you need to do, what you need to plan for in order for your class to, in order for you to succeed in this class. And then finally, once you finish with this orientation, please email me a note that you've completed it. Subject line should be pop culture orientation. And also ask any questions you might have at that time. All right, that's all I have for now. Thank you very much for watching and see you online.