 This short presentation introduces you to the massive open online course on the virtual linguistics campus, phonetics, phonology and transcription. With two steps you can access your class. First you have to log in with your personal data and then you can click on the class name that you would see on your personal VLC start site right after login. A click on this link leads you to the interactive class start site. On the class start site you have access to some class-related links and you will find a hyperlink to the class-related forum. Here it is. The core of the class are the 13 units where the first one, the class preliminaries, informs you about some general aspects of the class and makes some further suggestions about how to study online. Also the most basic functions of the program that is navigation and buttons etc. are explained here. In addition to this you will find helpful routines that find out whether your computer is configured correctly and whether the submission of worksheets is successful. For this reason we recommend to go through the class preliminaries very carefully especially if you're a first-time user of a VLC class. The remaining units exhibit the content of this class and if you wish you can retrieve an overview of each unit by means of a click on one of the information symbols here. For example this one here which displays the content of the unit the transcription of North American English. Let us now look at the content of the class traditionally referred to as syllabus. Now the class is subdivided into four central parts. After an introduction to the main goals of phonetics with a strong focus on articulatory phonetics we will introduce two essential aspects of phonology the concept of the phoneme and variance of phonetic transcription. In the third part of the class these concepts will be applied to present-day English. We will look at the sound system of the central British English accent received pronunciation and at that of North American English and we'll then discuss aspects of connected speech and suprasegmental present-day English phonology. Finally we will introduce two more general topics comparative phonology and the theory of distinctive features. Being part of a massive open online course means go through each e-learning unit at your own pace. Study the virtual session using the guiding questions. Watch the corresponding e-lecture video and optionally use the integrated tests in the interactive tutor. You can check your knowledge there and if you wish you can discuss further problems with your classmates in the class-related forum which is open for all registered users of your class. Finally you want to know what you have to do in order to get a qualified certificate for this class I think. Well that's really simple. All participants will receive a standard certificate for regular and active participation. We won't check it though we just rely on you. To be given a qualified certificate we want you to do the worksheets one for each e-learning unit. If the overall score is 60% or higher you will receive such a qualified certificate. If not we will just confirm your participation with a standard certificate. So we invite you to join us in our phonetics, phonology and transcription MOOC. As soon as the class has been activated you will be contacted by the VLC team. The rest is up to you. So on behalf of my team let me thank you for your attention and enjoy your class.