 Hello and welcome to EGE 101. I'm Brandon Schwartz. I'll be teaching the course this semester. Very excited to have you in the class. I've taught somewhere north of 3000 students EGE 101 over the years and I'm excited to teach it to you. So what I want to do now is just give a real brief introduction on what the course is and what your expectations should be. So what we talk about in EGE 101 is energy in the environment. We talk about energy choices and their environmental impact. Sometimes it's things that you wouldn't think of right away. So for example, right now about 40% of the world's electricity comes from burning coal. And so we'll talk about why that is but you know it's worth asking yourself why in the world, how in the world do we burn coal to produce electricity. And as I said, we'll discuss that. There's lots of environmental impacts from any energy choice. And so we'll go over those pros and cons of different choices. But we'll start off with just an introduction about you know an overview of energy in the world today and where energy use is going in the 21st century. So, but for now, we'll just look at some of the course expectations. So, if you've seen the syllabus, then you'll know that we have several ways to give you feedback throughout the semester. The main one that you'll be thinking of probably is midterms. They are called midterm exams in the syllabus and they are exams. I prefer to think of them as really hard quizzes and the reason for that is you if you're imagining a traditional sit at a desk with a pencil and paper and take an exam it's not really like that and all of the midterms will be already questions multiple choice you'll take them through canvas, and I'll give you more information about that, you know, as the semester progresses but what you're looking at here as far as the class structure is the units and so you can kind of get a sense for, for, for how we've structured the class or the first thing we'll do is talk about introduction to energy, what energy is power efficiency, which will, you know, we'll define later. In midterm one, you'll notice it only covers two units. So the good news for you is that there's not a lot of material that you would need to study for in order to complete midterm one successfully. The second midterm covers the three fossil fuels and climate change as a group of as a common theme. And then midterm three covers nuclear energy, wind energy, solar energy and hydropower. So as you can see the midterms aren't cumulative meaning they only test you on content from each of those sections, but the final exam is cumulative. So by the time you get to the final exam you will need to understand the entire course. And as far as ways that we grade you that the first is on a weekly basis, every lesson. We have participation points scattered throughout and so as you look at the text and video for each lesson at some point you'll come to breaks where there'll be interactive content included that will prompt you with a question that you will then answer usually multiple true false if you get it right that's that's great if you get it wrong that's fine too because usually the very next slide in that interactive content will be an explanation for for what what you did wrong if the event you did get it wrong. You get unlimited attempts so you should get all 10% of the participation points available in this course. So one of your grade will be preclass activities which are going to be completed on canvas. And the idea behind these is to give you a really quick brief introduction to the content of the next week just a little bit in advance we'll talk about things that you've probably never even thought of before maybe maybe you've never had an opportunity to think much about wind energy but you've always wanted to so the questions in that preclass activity will just be thought provoking the questions on wind energy. There will be six homework assignments and these are going to be going to be a little bit harder than the preclass activities, which are a little bit harder than the participation points. And you usually have two weeks to complete those and those six assignments are worth 30% of your grade so about five points for each one. Every midterms are worth a total of 30% and as I said you'll have 60 minutes to complete 40 multiple choice questions. It's not given at a specific time it's given on a specific day. You can see the dates for the midterms in your syllabus. Once you access the midterm, you'll have 60 minutes to complete it but you can access at any time throughout the day that is offered. And then of course there's one final exam which is similar in content to the midterms but just longer. Okay, so as far as the lessons form at every week you'll log into canvas you'll go to the module that we're doing that week or unit. There's 12 of them. There's no textbook required everything's on canvas. If we have any external readings or resources we will link to them in the canvas lesson. As I said there's 12 units, which is basically 12 weeks. If you look at orientation taking one week, 12 weeks of lessons that means you will probably have two weeks at the end of the semester that you will probably mostly spend doing final exam preparation and we might have some some live exam prep, if that's something that you expressed interest in. But as far as during the regular part of the semester each unit's got two or three lessons, you'll notice that these lessons are a mixture of text figures like like graphs, some example problems. Some short lectures similar to this video lecture here, and also some open source video so the idea is to give you a really good overview, using all of these different media types of each lessons content. Participation points are scattered throughout each lecture so you need to really make sure you view each page of each lesson in order to not miss any of those participation points. And then certainly if you have any questions, you know I am available through email at any time. So that's all that I wanted to talk about today. I'm really happy to have you in the course welcome, and we'll get started.