 Greetings students! Welcome to this tour of your online course Popular Culture in the US. This video is just to kind of introduce you to the Blackboard Environment and this particular course where all the different information is for you to partake of. So when you come into the course you come on to this home page and this is our landing page. It has the various information that will be informed by different events within the course. So for instance if you look at your to-do list you start to see what are things that are due this week, the things to do in the future. You get to see alerts, things that are past due. So it's a nice pulse of where you are in the course and what kind of changes have happened since the last time you were here. One of the big ones is my announcements and this is where you want to check out regularly because I will be posting announcements regularly and you'll want to be able to be most up-to-date with whatever changes or new things are coming into the course. You can also find announcements over here on the left hand side and this left hand side really is your navigation through the course. Next would be calendar and the calendar is a really great feature. If you come in it gives you a really good view of what's going on in the course. If you notice red is your color and or red may not be your color. Your color will be randomly assigned but as you can see you know it indicates what are the different deadlines for the modules that we have in the course and so this is January. If I wanted to go to February again it gives me those different deadlines I can anticipate and keep an eye out for. I also if I wanted to take this calendar and to sync it with my personal calendar such as my Gmail calendar or my iPhone calendar right down here is this link. You get this as external link and you can actually sync it in so that these deadlines will show up on your personal calendar. Along the left here we also have course information and this is where you're going to find all of the guidelines. It's where you'll find the syllabus, information about the course navigation, really all of the different information that you need to know in order to properly run through and complete this course. Learning modules is of course where all the learning takes place. They're set up weekly so we'll have the name of the module and then we will have you know what that date is that that module covers. When you go into a module you have a pretty clear inconsistent breakdown. You have the topics and objectives, the learning guide, the activities and the assignments, the learning materials. So each week you'll have different learning materials that's going to include articles, that's going to include links, that's going to include videos. So you really want to make sure that you properly go through those materials each week. Every week we have a discussion. In different weeks we'll have either, we'll have bigger, larger assignments that are part of a larger picture of things we're looking to complete and then we'll have the open form that is a place for discussion beyond what the specific or just a weekly discussion asks you to perform. The discussions area is obviously a place where all the discussions take place and you can see them listed here and each one will give you the prompt and what to expect and all of that. About the instructor, if you want to learn a little bit more about me you can always click on that and find out about me. The questions form is of course a place for you to ask questions and I encourage you to please please please ask any and all questions. I don't know that you're having trouble so if you are and you need to ask something please post. You certainly can email me but if it's something in terms of you know something you don't understand that's related to the course at large like where's this piece of information or how does this work that's a great place to go. My grades is obviously where you will go to get your grades and it's set up really well here in Blackboard. You have, you can have all of your assignments that are listed and then see which ones have been graded. You can click on the ones that have just been graded. Any ones that are upcoming and any that have been submitted. You can also over here on the right you can reorder these by different options and then additional resources. This is a really great place. It is filled with lots and lots of documentaries on popular culture or related to popular culture. The only thing that I warn you is that you will need your North Shore library card activated in order to access them. They are available on films on demand and so therefore you need your access code for that. So that is the tour of the course. If you have any questions please let me know and I will see you in the course. Thank you.