 Welcome to Psychology 1609, the Neuroscience of Learning and Introduction to Mind, Brain, Health, and Education. This is a tour of the Canvas classroom so that you can understand how things are laid out, where to find information, and to make sure that you're on top of everything as far as being able to communicate with us whenever you need to during the course. If you open this page, you'll see that on the left hand side, you'll have the Canvas toolbar. This is where you have your account information, so you can change your profile. Please add a profile picture that's not of a cat or a dog or something cute. We want your real face there, please. This is also where you can activate your ePortfolio if you'd like to maintain all the documents throughout the course there. In the course section, you'll be able to see all the list of the classes that you might be taking. The calendar will also list all of the due dates for all of the different courses that you're in. This is a link to the inbox, to the email within Canvas. Please keep the communication about course topics within our Canvas email. Please don't send us emails to our private emails. Make sure that we maintain correspondence within the course structure. If you need any help with Canvas, if you need any tutorials or backup information or video guidance, you can also click on the Help button here. You'll notice then on the next toolbar here is what's actually going on in the class. So what we're going to do is we're going to go through each of these different buttons so that you know where you're going to be able to find stuff. Okay. So from here, you can scroll down and you'll see the information related to the syllabus. And if you click that, you'll be able to see the hyperlink to the information about the course, the descriptors there, all of the different information that you need there. Or you can just look at the brief description that's written here into the syllabus. If you scroll down a bit further, then you see the course outline, which describes all of the different modules here. This will be a link to the teaching team so you can get some information about the people teaching this class, as well as the Mind, Brain, Health, and Education student resources, which have things like links to glossaries about Mind, Brain, Health, and Education, as well as other programs and conference opportunities. So that's what you'll find on the home page. You can also just jump straight to your calendar from here if you wanted to do that, and to see any important notifications. And you'll also see right at the top here that your announcements will show up right at the very top of the home page, okay? So if you wanted to go and see any announcements, for example, you remember, well, last week there was an announcement about something else that I needed to remember. You click on the announcements and you'll see all of the announcements are listed here. So you get a series of them and they're all listed in reverse chronological order. The next button has APA resources, and that's because the language of our course is the American Psychological Association. And so in order to communicate, we ask you to write in this format. That means you have to cite in this format. So please click on each one of these hyperlinks and an update yourself. APA has changed to the seventh edition as of February 2020. So there is an updated version here of all the information. So there's a style blog and there's also a non graded quiz if you want to sort of test yourself on the way you do APA structure. So we hope you use this, love this. We know that it's kind of a mini psychological torture in it of itself to try to remember all these different rules. But we tried to do our best to help you with that because you'll see that there's an APA template there. So we'll talk about that a little bit more when we get to the project, which is down here. So after the APA resources, you'll find a very special page that talks about assignments. So the assignment page is really interesting. So if this has all of your assignments here. So this is the way the quizzes are organized, the way the discussion boards are set up, and the way that your semester project is submitted. And so all of these things are listed here. If you'd like, you can also list them by due dates so that you can see in the order that things are due rather than by type. So you can modify this in the way that's most useful to you. But some people like to just look at the calendar. Other people like to look at the assignment date so that they see when things are due there. But go ahead and structure this in the best way that serves your purposes. It only changes on your page, so nobody else sees that. But it's one way to stay on top of the work. The next is a really fun space. This is our resources. The bundles link takes you to a list of all of the different resources that are open to you to use and to support you during each of the different weeks' reviews. So as you'll notice in the instructions for each of these, during each week's module, you're invited to look at at least one resource from each of the bundles. So say that we are in week one and we're just getting an overview of Mind, Brain, Health, and Education. By the way, these are listed alphabetically. But on the side here, you'll see which weeks they're related to so you can find them easily. And I'll also show you that these are directly hyperlinked from the module page. We'll look at that in just a second. But once you're inside the bundles, you'll see that there's a variety of resources. There's around about maybe a hundred different things here that you can choose from. Please watch at least one or read at least one of these before we have our live class. Why do we ask that? We ask that so that you can come with an additional perspective to the class, that you've looked at some of the information about Mind, Brain, and Education. So the instructions are basically go ahead and skim over the information that's here. And if you choose, okay, this is something I really want to look at. I'd like to see educational neuroscience exploring cognitive processes that underlie learning. That sounds really cool. So if you just click on that, you'll see that all of these hyperlinked directly to the information. So we try to make this as easy on you as possible so that you can have easy access to the information. And so as I mentioned before, there's around a hundred different topics here. There's videos, podcasts, and there's other academic papers here. Choose one of them before you come to class. If you're a grad student, you're asked to look at at least two of them. But the idea here is to explore and look at the information and enjoy the opportunity to see a variety of resources that don't cost you anything instead of tying you to a textbook. The other point of the bundles is so that you have multiple entry points. We know that in our class, we have some people taking this class for graduate credit, and this is your last class. And you are totally steeped in the information and know a whole lot about neurobiology, for example. But we also know that we have undergraduates in our class, and we also have people taking this class for non-credit who might be taking their first online class ever in their lives and have never studied mind, brain, and education formally. And so we have a variety of resources. We have some things that are kind of light, and we have some things that are more complex. And we want you to choose what's most appropriate for you as an entry point to the information. So if you go back out here to the bundles, you'll see that there's at least one and oftentimes two bundles per week. And just below that, you'll also see that there are additional bundles. And these additional bundles are sort of born of people's semester projects. And we'll talk about that in just a second. But as people chose to dive into different areas of study, we created bundles with them so that there's more information, so that people have an easier jump into the information. So it's not too complex. For example, last semester, somebody wanted to look at the ideas of whether writing by hand or writing on a keyboard was more beneficial to learning. So we created a literacy and handwriting bundle for them by looking at and researching with them, trying to find the most up-to-date information possible on that topic. So you'll see that there are bundles that are related to each module, which are the ones on the top here, class-specific bundles with the weeks next to them. And then you'll see there's additional bundles that are listed down here. So one of the ways that you might think about approaching your semester project is maybe just pop into a couple of the bundles and see what's going on in there and try to see if any of that information relates to a topic that you might be most interested in and sort of poke around there and see where your interests are sparked. That's one way to also approach your semester project is to think about what you're really interested in to look at the kinds of research that are occurring in that area. So once you get down to the bundles, you'll get to this other link, which has to do with class recordings. We try to make this kind of easy as a one-stop area for you. So every single week, week one, week two, week three, all the way through 15 is listed here. And you'll see they have a similar structure. You'll see that the things that you do before class, you know, the pre-class video, the things that happened during class, this is the live class recordings of our class, right? And then if there's a section that week which graduate students are required to attend, but not undergraduates, but many undergraduates do come anyways because the information is interesting, it's a deep dive normally into an area of the topic of the week. So for example, in week two, we have functional neuroanatomy, how does the brain work? So here's one about brain basics that goes into the fundamental areas of the brain and another one that's on neurotransmitters, how does those actually work, okay? So we have that information here and each of these hyperlinks back to the video and also here to the slides that relate to that. So this is the area on this side here, the class recordings where you can find all of the information for your class. So this is where you find the recordings, where you find the PowerPoints and you can also see the layout of exactly what's up and coming. So these things are highlighted in blue right now because they've already passed, but your class will be hyperlinked as they come along, as those different units become live. And we open up each module with two weeks in advance notice because we know that many of you are busy people and you're traveling or you have to organize other class obligations. So we try to give you enough leeway so that you can look at the information beforehand if you need to rearrange your schedule in that way. So if you want to look at specific assignments, you'll see that there's a link for discussion boards, there's a link for your quizzes and there's a link for your semester projects as well. Okay, so just so that we'll continue going down this, but just so you know, this is a assignment specific area and this lists all of the discussion boards for the class, weeks one through weeks 15. So in case you were missing information on a discussion board, you can go back in and you can review it here. So you can click on any of the discussion boards. It reiterates the instructions and then it shows you and then you'll see the chain of responses there. So if you're given a red flag and somebody says, hey, by the way, you did not do the discussion board responses for week eight, you can just go through discussions here and jump right to it. Also, your grades are available 24 seven here. We try to stay as up to date as possible. We ask for one week to do our grading and so you can generally expect to get your grades back within the week for any assignment that we have. This class has a whole lot of small assignments or don't have a huge weight to them, but there's a lot of them and this is meant to keep you on task focused with the information but to have low stakes as far as all of the different assignments are concerned. So as an individual, you would be able to click on here and you will see your grades for each of the different assignments. So right now as I'm a test student here, there's some things I give myself 100 for and some things to zero. So this isn't a very good indicator right now, but just so that you know that you'll be able to see the grades for every single assignment that you have and you'll be able to see if and when you might have something missing, for example, and take advantage of our rewrite policy just so that you are clear. The syllabus really spells out how you can and should rewrite any assignments for a better grade. We think that anybody who can learn from their mistakes should be given the opportunity to do so. So, but you do have to do that within a certain amount of time. So generally if you submit something, it's graded. You have up to one week to resubmit it for a better grade based on the corrections that are suggested. Next down here on the toolbar are the live classrooms and this is just a hyperlink to help you get into our Zoom classrooms. So instead of having to remember this code to get into the classroom, you just click on the live weekly class link, for example, and so for our synchronous class, you just click here and it'll take you straight into the Zoom classroom. You'll see here that we also have Zoom classrooms set aside for the section room, which is different. It's a different meeting room than the live classroom as well as a hyperlink to the faculty office hours so that you can go into these different Zoom rooms. There's also a fourth room that's open to you. You can meet up with your fellow classmates in the student to student Zoom room that's open 24-7. We never go in there as a teaching staff. It's just another space for you guys to meet, okay? Also on the same live classroom page, you'll see that there's other hyperlinks to Zoom support in case you would like to do a tutorial or to get a better understanding of how Zoom works. Next on the toolbar is modules and in the modules link, you'll see that we have each of the classes. Now, we have 15 modules and we have 15 weeks of classes and so you can go into the modules directly through this link. So rather than going in through the home page to this particular unit, you could also get to the exact same place by going in through the module page so you can go and just click on that and it'll take you back to that exact same page, okay? So you can enter either through the home page or through the module page if you're looking for the information here. Now, what's so great about this particular page is that it helps layout and this is an identical layout for every single week, every single module that we have. We share the main topic, we show the big idea and then you'll have three steps. One is what you have to do before class, one is what you do to get into class and the third step is what you do after the class. So as our course is 100% flipped with a synchronous meeting time, this means that there's more things to do before class than there are to do during and after class, okay? So we'd like to motivate you to take the quiz of the week to watch the pre-class video. If you'd like to, you can also download the slides that go with that pre-class video and then to go into the bundles and skim the titles of the information in those bundles and then as an undergraduate, choose at least one of the resources from the bundles and as a graduate, choose at least two resources. So you hyperlink into this, this takes you back to, you remember we had this bundles page link here. This is another way into the bundles, you'll find that there's a lot of repetition here so that you can get to the same information through different routes, okay? Then after that, we'd like you to go to the discussion board, remember we said you can get to the discussion boards here, but you can also just click on it here and it'll take you to the prompt for this particular week. Based on this particular prompt, we'd like you to write your response which is between 200 and 250 words and please respect that, we really want you to try to learn to synthesize your ideas and that is part of our rubric, if you'd like to see the rubric for that, you just click on this, it says show rubric and you'll see how the grading is done for that particular assignment, okay? So going back into our module again, if we are here in this sample module three here, after you've done the quiz, watch the video, gone into the bundles and done the discussion board, if you have certain questions that have jumped out to you and that you're doubting that you're wondering about, I watched the video on plasticity and I'd like to know if there's a difference between experience-based plasticity versus changes in plasticity due to therapy. I wanna talk about that. You click here and this will take you to a different discussion board which gives us a heads up on that these are things that we need to discuss in our live class. So this information here is gonna help guide us as to things that we need to help go deeper into when we meet in the synchronous live class, okay? Additionally, if there's a logistical question, this means if you have questions, if you say, listen, this hyperlink doesn't seem to be working on this page or something like that, just click here and then you can also put that question up and we try to stay on top of that really quickly so that you'd get a response to that, okay? That's step one. Those are the things you do before class and that's a lot more than typical classes because this is a flipped classroom setting. So just be prepared that there's a lot more work to do before class than there is after class, okay? This means that the homework effectively is done before you get to the live class, okay? So after you've done that, on the day on our synchronous meeting time, you just simply click on here, this takes you back. Remember we said that you can go to the live classroom from here while you can also just click on it here. Does the same thing, it takes you to our live Zoom class. In the last few minutes of our class, you'll have a reflection to do which has six sentences basically, three things you didn't know before the class, two things that you're curious about and want to know more about and one thing that you might consider changing in your personal professional life based on the information that you've learned in this week's class, okay? So you can either click on that or in the live class we also put the same hyperlink to this assignment into our chat in the Zoom room so you'll be able to hyperlink directly to it so you won't have to search for that link. But if you wanted to, you can also go here, okay? Then after we finish meeting in that live class, you can give us some feedback if you'd like. You can tell us this work, this didn't work, I really wish you would do something else differently. Help us know how we can support you better in the learning. Also listed here under the follow up for the classes are the different sections that are offered that week. We usually have one or two sections per week to give you enough options so that you can meet the minimum requirement of the number of sections and we allow you to choose the ones that you want to go to. You're not obliged to but you're encouraged to come to all of them if possible but if you need to miss some of them, you can go ahead and have a preview of what those sections would be. Some of the sections are prerecorded. For example, this one on neuronal cell types was done by a TA of mine in a previous year and this is a prerecorded neuronal cell type section. This is kind of giving you a little bit more flexibility because you have the entire week to do the three to one reflection after you've watched that video or you can come to the live sections. This one would be on the Connectome project for example. I'm gonna meet live in the section room and you still have to complete that three to one. So remember the way that we document attendance is through your three to one assignment that's done after you have attended the sections. You can also download slides that are available there and then we give you a reminder that in addition to that initial discussion board post, you have to reply to two other learners and this will jump you to that reply area where you have to read the post of at least two other people and give a reply to them in 75 to 100 words and these cannot be things like, oh, nice work. They have to be really substantial because we're looking for an exchange there and a way to develop different perspective taking on the information, okay? So that's the way the modules page is set up. Every single week has an identical structure so you can jump into any single week and you're gonna have exactly the same structure here. Main topics, big idea, step one, step two, step three, they're identical. So you can use this page as kind of a checklist to make sure that you get through all of the work each week. As we said before, there's a lot of assignments but they're small in the weight that they have but they're meant to keep you on top of the information. There's a link here to the people which will take you to a list of all of your classmates and there's a link here to the quizzes. Again, the quiz is linked on the module page but if you click here and just wanna look at any quizzes and you want to go ahead, for example, and try to do make an attempt on all of the quizzes that's terrific because as we said before, you can take the quizzes 100 times. We really don't care. In fact, it's actually a good idea if you take the quiz before you watch the videos and come to the live class so you get a baseline. You know, what is it, where's my starting point? What are my gaps and knowledge because that would actually help you highlight the things you're looking for when you watch the video. So go ahead and do the quiz beforehand, during, after. The average person in our class will take the quiz at least four times per week in order to get that perfect score because it's one way to get 25% of your grade, 100%. So please take the time to review that. It really helps you shore up vocabulary. It's just multiple choice or true and false so it's just knowledge-based information but it's well worth doing, okay? The next button here on the menu is the semester project and it's kind of elaborate page because we wanna give you as many details as possible. Don't get overwhelmed by this because we have an optional workshop that you can come to for an hour just before each assignment is due so that you get a better sense of how to organize and structure each piece that's submitted, okay? So this is the reason we do the semester project, sort of the big idea here and the submissions. If you're an undergraduate, you only have to do the first two submissions and this is due by week six. However, you have through week 15 to perfect it, okay? If you're a graduate student, you have to do all five submissions and there's an optional submission six in case anybody needs that cushion to be able to improve and get the grade that they want. You can also do a rewrite of submission five which would be considered submission six at the very end. We begin the intake of these submissions starting at the end of week four. We have submission one where you try to decide your topic, come up with a research question and begin to do your literature reviews by week eight. Do the analysis and come to some conclusions about your topic. Each of the different submissions also has some guidance in a video if you want. How do you develop a good research question? How do you write a great literature review? How do you come to an analysis? What do conclusions look like? Additionally, we hope you take the time to visit and become very familiar with the library. We'll get there in just a second about the resources that Harvard has for you. And since we know that one of the best ways to achieve or complete something or fulfill requirements is if you have something called a worked model, we have several sample papers from previous years where students have given us permission to share their work. So you can see how successful work looks. So do have a look at some of those older papers. You can see certain problem areas, things that worked well for the papers. And you can have a look at that and that should give you a better framing of what it is you're after when you do the semester project. And look at this list of journals that are very important for the mind, brain health and education field that may be of use to you as you try to explore and look for different topics. So even just looking at the titles of some of these journals will probably give you some really cool ideas about topics that you might want to pursue. As we promised in the APA section, there's a lot of information about APA structure. But here on the semester project page, you'll also see that at the very bottom there, we have the APA word template that I mentioned to you before. We also have guidance on how to do annotated bibliographies. We want you to explore them all, look at them all, get familiar with this information because it is gonna be a good guide for you on how to write up the paper that you're gonna be asked to submit to us, okay? So this template is done in APA levels one, two, three, four, they're sort of spelled out for you so that you're able to use this basic structure so you don't have to use a lot of head space on thinking of the format and the structure. You can really think more about the content. And so our goal with creating the template and asking you to please use that is to avoid all these silly mistakes that happen with APA citations, okay? So the next button after the semester project is looking at student locations. We like to see how many different countries around the world that our students come from and which states in the United States because it adds a whole lot to our perspective taking on each of the topics. Below that is a list of student resources. Now this page will link you to a new page. You'll have to click here and this will take you to the Harvard pages of student resources, all right? So here we have information about careers, academic health, math, the writing center which we really want to encourage you all to go to. You are given a certain number of hours that you're allowed to visit the writing center and they give you feedback and it's wonderful and awesome and we really want you to take advantage of this service at Harvard. If you have any problems with your emails or computers you can go ahead and click here. There is career guidance. Please take advantage of that if you're looking for guidance right now. And the library resources which is a particularly important button I'm gonna click on this to show you. It shows you the Hollis, the Harvard online library services and the specific guide for extension students. You all have access to Harvard's amazing library collection and pretty much just about anything you can imagine you want they will get for you. So please learn how to do the Hollis search for information and also become friendly with the librarians there because they're there to support you and to help you find things, right? If you say I'd like to make an appointment with you Jonathan to talk a little bit about my semester project I've been trying to look for information in the certain area. They will definitely help you do that, okay? If you link to the Harvard Extension School Library guide there's a whole lot of other services and information here that will help you. So these guys are amazing. They're here to help you and it just Ask a Librarian webpage sort of gives you some of the Q and A but do visit them because they're there to support your research. If you go down to the next button on this menu goes to the syllabus. So that's the same that's a repeated page of what you found on the homepage. So you'll be able to see the same information that's there. You can scroll down and see the information. But the cool thing about this particular page is that the activities of the class are also listed there. So in case you'd like a quick course summary of all of the things that we're doing and the assignments that you'll have do and at what point that they're due what date and what time that they're due. You can also scroll down there through the syllabus button here, okay? A recent addition to our class is Yellow Dig. Yellow Dig is meant to be like a social media structure where our community shares things with each other that are kind of related to the class but not necessarily 100% related to the class. So things about like attending the Harvard graduation or if there was a conference that came up or if somebody came across a great article that they wanted to share or the whole idea of using Yellow Dig in this structure is to offload the social element of the class and to permit a space to share. Look, there's conferences coming up or there's this great book I'd like to recommend. It's a space where you might not have a natural home for it within our classroom structure but it's something we love because it also just brings together our community. Finally, the last button that you'll have here is a search button in case you're not sure where to find something. I wanna know where announcements are. You click on that and it just gives you a search within the Canvas page, okay? So that is our course. We are so excited to have you here. If you have any questions, you can go to your inbox and send us an email. You can go within the modules and you can post a content or a logistics question to us. You can come to our office hours or you can go back and review the syllabus and make sure the information wasn't already listed somewhere. But do reach out. Let us know how we can support you in your learning in this class. Stay in touch and please ask any questions you might have on your mind right now to make sure that we're all on the same page and can use the design of this class in the best way possible. Looking forward to working with you. Take care.