 Hello there, my name is Wendy Riggs and I just wanted to welcome you to this class. I'm your intrepid leader and intrepid is an accurate statement of the kind of leader that I shall be. It's going to be a great adventure and the purpose of this little welcome clip is to make sure that you have a sense of what you need to do immediately. So, if there is some part of you, answer this question honestly that decided to take an online general biology class because you thought it would be easier. No, it's not going to be easier. I hope isn't harder. I mean, it's the same content. It's the same ideas. I teach face-to-face general bio, so I am using the same materials. But I definite like there's an added cognitive load of having the fact that this is online. The biggest significant piece of this online course for you that is going to be a little bit different than maybe other online courses is that this course has a lab component. The added cognitive load involves prepping your own lab work. I am in process of building all those labs. You have a lab a week and I hope to get them published soon enough so that you have time to get the materials that you need. But I would imagine that this course is going to take a little more time than what you would experience with a face-to-face just because you have to create all of this stuff. That said, if you are tech savvy, you can handle sort of independent thinking. You can figure things out and you're not afraid to ask questions when you can't figure it out on your own. Then I feel super confident that this is going to be a really solid course and we're going to have some fun. So first of all, if you need to contact me, I have logged into your Canvas course and there's a couple things that you can do. First of all, if you go to the inbox right here, you can send me a message through Canvas. You can also send me an email and my email is posted like in a jillion places in here and so you can always send me an email to communicate which is awesome. I think those are probably the two best ways to communicate right now, especially as we're getting started. Oh, and I have a discussion board. Let me see. There's another place where you can communicate with me to ask questions. It would be the questions for rigs board. And so if you have questions that you think everybody else can benefit from, that is a good place to post questions like that. Before we get anywhere else, we have to make sure that you are super comfortable reaching out to me if you need to. Okay, so this week, we hit the ground running and there is a module zero that you need to get rolling on right away. When you get into Canvas, hopefully you're seeing this video first. I'm going to click on modules over here on the whatever left side toolbar menu thing, whatever that thing is. And it will take you to what is published and available right now in our class. Module zero is required before our first content module will open and there's content in week one. So you, like my intention with module zero is to make sure number one, you know what you're getting into. This class has been full pretty much since it opened. It was the first Bio one class to fill. It filled faster than any of our other face-to-face classes. So I know you all want to be here and you want to have this online option but you really do need to be honest with yourself because if not you can handle the amount of stuff that you're going to have to do which is very similar to what you'd have to do in a face-to-face class with the exception of prepping your own labs. So I want you to walk through the entire module and I make videos and I like making videos but I'm not making videos for every single thing you have to do in here. You read the page and I mean I know that I probably don't even have to tell you that but through the course of module zero there are eight assignments. There are eight things that you are going to do and they include a discussion board, they include things like sending me an email that's not too hard in the proper way identified in your syllabus. Reading your syllabus, looking at the schedule. There's even a little quiz so you can practice like doing all this stuff. Once you finish module zero then week one will open for you. So really you're kind of motivated to get through module zero as quickly as possible because week one module is not a full normal content week. Normally we'll have two lectures and a lab every week and this week one we have one lecture and a lab that reduces your to-do list a little bit but you still have, you're going to be completing a lab, you're going to be setting up your lab notebook. There's a lot of stuff that is going to happen so the sooner you get on it the happier we all will be. And let's see, I think you're good. Okay, that's all. I'm not going to tell you anything else. I'm just excited that you're here and excited that you know how to contact me and excited that I'm getting ready to publish this course for you. Okay, bye-bye.