 Greetings and welcome to the Introduction to Astronomy. The purpose of this video is as a practice lesson, so this goes with our practice lesson just so you can get a chance to look at a video and see what will be coming over the course of the semester. So I will go over a little bit of the basic information of the course, but there will be a lot more detail provided elsewhere. So let's go ahead and take a look at what we will have here and the practice lesson. The idea why I do a practice lesson is to give you an idea of how each module in this class is going to work. You will see a number of different things including the lecture materials, the discussions, different types of assignments, and a checklist. And I'll discuss them all very briefly here, although if you go to the course navigation video you will be able to see it in a little bit more detail over the class itself. Now what we'll see is, let's look at lecture materials first. Lecture materials will be broken into various different things. You will have lecture videos, links to videos, such as this one for each lesson. You will have access to the slides in various formats. I'll give you some review questions that you can look at as a review and studying and some various additional materials for you to look at for that lesson. So as you'll see, there's no assignments here. This is just the basic background information that you will want to look at for the class. Now we will also see that we will have different types of discussions. My astronomy classes will have an APOD discussion for the week. That's an astronomy picture of the day where we discuss our Monday picture. There are also graded discussions several times a week, links to discussions for class help if you want to post questions, and any other miscellaneous discussions that may be there. These are the key ones, these are the ones that are graded. So those are the ones that you will receive a grade for, although the APOD questions are given for extra credit at the end of the semester. So that tells you a little bit about the discussions. We can also look at the assignments and there's different types of assignments. There are homework assignments that are used. There are quizzes, review quizzes. There are lab quizzes, which break down the lab material for your submission. I do article reviews, solar observations, which is a semester project. So this is an important portion of your grade and nighttime observations. And again, this only applies to astronomy classes. So if you're taking a physical science class, this part does not apply, although you will see all of the other sections of this. So really, again, this is the whole purpose of this video, just to give you a practice video to look at, to summarize a little bit of the class procedures. Again, look at the class navigation video, which will walk you through this in the class. Make sure you go through each of the sections of the practice lesson to familiarize yourself with how my class is set up and how it's going to work. And make sure you complete everything and do the checklist at the end. There is a bonus at the end if you do complete all of that. So I recommend that you complete everything, although, of course, you're not required to do anything here, but there is a chance for a bonus at the end. So that concludes this lesson for the practice video. We'll be back again next time for another lesson. So until then, have a great day, everyone, and I will see you in class.