 Hello, and welcome to CIS 110, Introduction to Computers, the online edition. I'll be your instructor, Mr. Adam Gawita. You can call me Mr. Gawita, Mr. Adam, Adam, Mr. G. Honestly, I don't really care. Generally speaking, this is going to be an online class. The only introduction that interaction you're going to have with me is occasionally through emails and whenever I do these videos where I talk to you. So however you will feel like communicating to me, make this course your own. And that kind of extends outward. My classes are typically, especially my online classes, are very self-paced. So one of the things you'll notice on Blackboard is on the left hand side, there's sort of these weeks that all appear as we progress through the semester. Now each week, you'll be given pretty much X, Y, Z, your assignments, any videos that I happen to record, upload, and put on there, and any just general miscellaneous assignments that I expect you to do. You are expected to, at your own free time, go out, complete those assignments, do the readings, watch the videos. Whenever you kind of complete those, making sure you get them done, then you can kind of have the rest of the week off. As long as you make sure that you get everything squared away every week, you should be set. One of the things I don't recommend is waiting until the last minute, especially as we get into some of the topics such as Microsoft Access. Microsoft Access, from what I hear from my students, can take anywhere from an hour to an hour and a half to complete a single homework assignment. If you have two of those assignments in one week and you waited until, I don't know, the hour before the deadline on Sunday, Game of Thrones is on, not yet, but it will be, you know, basically we're playing ahead, playing ahead so you can be self-paced and you can get through this course without any trouble. One thing I do want to mention is this is your textbook, the New Perspective First Course Microsoft Office 2013, compatible with Windows 7 and Windows 8. But if you buy it new, you do get this orange kind of little packet here. This is known as the Access Code for SAM. Now the reason I mention that is that Access Code for SAM. That's pretty much where all of your assignments are going to be. That's where all of your tests are going to be. So if you don't get the SAM Access Code, you will fail the class, period. You may get like five as your final grade, so a zero and a half. So you do need that same Access Code. If you choose to not get the book or buy the book used, you will still need to get the SAM Access Code. Once I checked, Amazon is charging $100 for them, $99.99.75. Needless to say, it's a very expensive item. So it's almost not that bad of an idea to get the bundle. I think this is running at the bookstore, $130, $140.00. You're getting a little more, you get some book. I know for some people, you might not ever crack this open. But this is going to be beneficial to you. You're going to run into a homework assignment, say, for example, setting up a mail merge. Have you ever done a mail merge? Do you even know what that means? This is going to have that information there for you. So it's a good resource to look into. Effectively, once you get that, one of the things I recommend is getting on SAM, registering for your class, and you will still need to register for our class. So you've signed up for SAM, you'll need to register for ours as well. You will get put on a waiting list. The waiting list is to make sure that Person A from Mr. Secura's class or whoever's class doesn't try and sign up for my class and vice versa. So it's just a formality sake. Generally speaking, I try to go on SAM and approve students once every three to four hours. I try and do it about three to four times a day. So if you don't have access immediately, just wait a little bit. If you still don't have access after 12 hours a day, shoot me an email and I'll do my best to immediately get to it and take care of it. Without further ado, the only other thing I can suggest is go on Blackboard. Take a look at the Getting Started section on the left-hand side. I'll give you sort of the step-by-step what to do from here. And then as we progress through the semester, you'll see that underneath Getting Started there will be weeks that start to appear as well. So get through those and if you have any questions, shoot me an email. I'm always available. I'll try and answer as soon as I can. But without further ado, best of luck this semester.