 Hi everyone, I'm Carrie Anderson and I will be your instructor for Geography 486. In this course we're going to learn how to make great maps, both for communication and research. So whether you're interested in cartography and data visualization for its own sake, or you simply want to learn how to make more professional maps to communicate your data, you're sure to gain a lot from this course. I wanted to take a minute to talk a little bit about my expectations for this course, what I expect from you, and what you can expect from me. So first I want to emphasize that this is a lab-based course. There'll be quizzes throughout and some graded map critiques and discussion participation points, but the majority of your grade is going to come from the lab assignments. And there's nine different labs so you don't have to worry too much if you don't do as well as you would like on the first one, your grade will be distributed throughout all of those. And I will also be there to help you if you get stuck on the labs. And I'm also going to encourage you to use discussion boards to troubleshoot problems with your classmates. Now for most of the labs in this course we will be using ArcGIS Pro and while everyone in this course should have some prior experience with GIS software, this may be your first experience with ArcGIS Pro. Personally I really like Pro and I think it will really help you to make better maps which is why I'm requiring it for this course, but it may take a little bit of time to get used to. With each lab I've designed some visual guides to help you with the lab content and you can probably get the most out of those if you are new to ArcGIS Pro. It has screenshots of the different menus and all that kind of stuff so that'll be really helpful hopefully for you. For each lesson you'll find two discussion forums in Canvas. One of these is intended for discussing your lesson content so more of the theoretical basis behind what we're doing and then there'll be one for lab content so that'll be sort of if you get stuck or if you want to help classmates troubleshoot an issue with the software. And I think there's definitely going to be some overlap in terms of the concepts that we talk about in these two different forums but it'll help keep us organized to have those different. If you find yourself stuck anywhere on the lab on making the map just post that in the discussion forum that should be your first step in trying to solve that problem. You can also email me if you have a more personal question that you don't want others in the class to see but similar to raising your hand in a resident course where the whole course kind of benefits from you asking a question, posting a question on that discussion board will really help you help your classmates because if you're having trouble it's very likely that someone else is also having that problem. Another way that in this course I'm going to help you guys is with office hours so obviously this is an online course so you won't be in my physical office which is here but I will be hosting zoom office hours and with those you'll be able to log in and use the chat to ask questions I'll share my screen and do some of the you know do some map making in real time and if you for some reason you know you have a schedule conflict whatever it is I'll record those so I'll post them afterwards it's best if you actually attend them because then you can you know make sure that your question is being answered but hopefully it'll be helpful for you no matter what to watch those zoom sessions and even if you attend it might be nice to have a record of that so you can always rewatch them later. In addition to labs we'll be doing some pure critique during the course I found this to be really helpful in teaching some other cartography courses it can be really enlightening to read another person's interpretation of your map it really gives you a different perspective and I found that giving feedback to others actually teaches you a lot just just by doing that so I hope that that will help you too. There will be graded quizzes so that's the other element of your grade most of the lessons will have a graded quiz and these questions are going to come from that online course content and required readings so you should keep up with the readings and use the student reflection prompts which are posted throughout the online course content to sort of pause and reflect on what you've learned so far. At the end of the course instead of using ArcGIS Pro we'll be making some interactive online maps so by this point you'll have mastered the basics of map design which ArcGIS Pro really helps you dive in and get excited about but then we're going to make some sort of newer this new age of interactive web mapping we're going to sort of get our feet wet and that which would be really fun and give you something to to share with others and show what you learned in the class so I think that's about it for my introduction but please don't hesitate to contact me with any questions and I look forward to working with all of you this semester.