Hello, January Intersession students and Spring 2024 students! I look forward to teaching you this coming semester. I have been teaching this course online for more than a dozen years, and teaching online is my favorite way of teaching. This particular course is asynchronous; there are no set class times each week that you have to be available to do the work. (In other words, there is no live web-based instruction.) Though the course is asynchronous, the course is not self-paced; you will need to do a certain amount of work each week, and I do not make all of the class materials for the entire semester available to you at the beginning of the semester; instead, I “release” material week by week. For detailed information on my course, please read through the message below all the way to the end (where you will see my name).
This course, like most 3-unit college courses throughout the U.S., requires approximately 144 hours of work for the typical student. If you are signing up for my January Intersession course (which runs from January 2 through January 27), you will need to spend approximately 36 hours per week on this course. If you are signing up for one of my 16-week courses (which run from January 29 through May 25), you will need to spend approximately 9 hours per week on this course. If you don’t have that much time available during the coming semester, please take the course during a different semester when you have more time available.
If you have never taken an online course before, please read the information on the Are You Ready? Palomar College Online Learning Readiness page to help you figure out if you would do well in an online course.
We will be using Canvas, an online-learning-management platform, for this course. I recommend that you take a look at the document titled Student Tips for Using Canvas; this document on how to use Canvas was written by David Gray, an Academic Technology Systems Administrator at Palomar, and it contains some very useful tips. I also strongly recommend that you watch the short video titled Canvas Overview from the Canvas Tutorial Video Series.
If you are registered for the January Intersession course, you will have access to our specific course site in Canvas by 12:01am on Tuesday, January 2. If you are registered for the 16-week semester, you will have access to our specific course site in Canvas by 12:01am on Monday, January 29. If you register after the course officially starts, you should have access to our Canvas site within three hours after you officially register for the course, assuming you register in the first few days of the course. Please note that people who join the course late don’t get extensions on due dates to finish assignments, so it’s very important to register for the course as soon as possible.
If you are registered in the course and decide to drop it for whatever reason, please do so officially as quickly as possible because there are often people on the waitlist before the semester begins and people who will try to crash the course after the official start of the semester. As soon as one student officially drops, another student can get into the course. Your cooperation in this matter is greatly appreciated!
If you are already registered in one of my Introduction to Sociology online courses, please skip the following paragraph and jump ahead to the paragraph that starts with “To access our class information on Canvas….”
Some of you who will be reading this are not yet registered in the course but want to add it. If the course is not filled and you decide you want to add, then go ahead and do that online through MyPalomar (eServices). I am teaching multiple sections of this course during both the January Intersession and the regular Spring semesters, so if one section is filled, remember to check the other ones for an opening. If there are no current openings in any of my sections, keep trying each day to enroll. If there is an official waitlist still in effect, try to get on that waitlist. As some people who are currently enrolled change their plans before the semester begins and officially drop the course, others are transferred from the waitlist to the official roster, thus opening up new places on the waitlist. As noted in the Class Schedule, if you are automatically added to the official class roster from the waitlist at any time, your account will be charged with the enrollment fees. If you will be using the waitlist, make sure you carefully read the information about how waitlists work that is found on the Waitlists page of Enrollment Services. Here’s an important part of the information on that Waitlists page: “If a student is automatically enrolled in a class, additional fees will be charged by this enrollment and must be paid within ten calendar days to avoid being dropped.”
To access our class information on Canvas (on or after the first day of the class), go to the Canvas login page. Please note that if you are a first-time user of Canvas, you will be prompted to create a CCCID (California Community Colleges Systemwide ID). You will need to do this only one time, and the process should take only a few minutes. For more detailed information on this process of creating a CCCID, go to the Canvas Login Procedure page.
Once you successfully log in, you will come to what is called your Dashboard. On that page, you will find a rectangular “card” for our class that has a quote about sociology on it; click on that card. You will then be taken to our class homepage. Read the information on the homepage very carefully, including any announcement(s) at the very top of the page. Reading all of that information on the homepage will help you learn how the course is organized and what is expected of you.
In addition to the Final Exam, there will be online quizzes on textbook chapters and some quizzes that will cover assigned articles and videos. You don’t have much choice on when to take the Final Exam. If you are in my 4-week Intersession course, you will have to take the Final on Jan. 27, at the time of your choice, and if you are in my 16-week course, you will have to take it on either May 24 or May 25, at the time of your choice. You will have much more control over when you take the quizzes; typically, you will have at least 7 days to pick from to take each of the quizzes. You will also have some writing assignments to do during the semester. Directions on how to take online quizzes and how to post to the Discussion Board can be found in FAQs documents on our homepage in Canvas.
There are two required textbooks for this course. The main textbook, titled Society: The Basics (16th ed.), is by John J. Macionis. The copyright year is 2024. (You do need this newest edition of the textbook.) Please make sure you don’t get our required textbook mixed up with Macionis’ more extensive–and more expensive–textbook titled Sociology. Our textbook is published in digital form by Pearson Education, Inc., and also in loose-leaf (print) form. There are two ways to get access to this Macionis textbook in digital form. First way: You can buy the REVEL access code associated with this textbook at our campus bookstore. There will be instructions written near the bottom of the receipt for how to redeem the code, requiring you to make a BryteWave account. Once you do that, you should get access to the publisher code. Once you have that publisher code, then go to the Pearson site for our book (this link is the course invite link), click on the orange “Redeem” link, create a Pearson account (or sign in with an existing one), and redeem your access code. If you run into trouble using this method, please contact the bookstore immediately for help. Second way (which seems to be easier and cheaper from past students’ experience): Buy instant access directly through Pearson Education, Inc. To do so, go to the Pearson site for our book (this link is the course invite link), click on the orange link that says “$74.99 Buy” (unless they have recently changed the price), create a Pearson account (or sign in with an existing one), and then follow the directions to buy instant access with a credit card or PayPal account. Note that there should be a free two-week trial in REVEL if you are waiting for a financial-aid check to buy your book; the link to access this trial should be available on the same page as the two orange links just described (it is a small link in a white font that says “Get 14-day temporary access” and appears directly below both of those orange links). If you need help, check out Revel student resources.
The second textbook, titled Gang Leader for a Day: A Rogue Sociologist Takes to the Streets, is by Sudhir Venkatesh. It is published by Penguin, and the copyright is 2008. You can find a photo of the textbook cover on the Amazon website. This book is available at our campus bookstore and at many online bookstores. This is a very popular book in the U.S., so I imagine it would be easy to find secondhand copies online.
You should try to have your textbooks on the first day of the semester (this is especially important if you are enrolled in the January Intersession class, which is only 26 days long). Reading assignments in the Macionis textbook start as soon as the semester begins. If necessary for financial reasons, you could wait to buy the Gang Leader for a Day book until a little later in the semester. Please note that it is always your responsibility to have access to the required textbooks.
If you need to contact me before the beginning of the semester about anything that is not covered above, please contact me via email at klesyna@palomar.edu. However, please note that I do not make course materials such as the syllabus, schedule, etc., available to students before the first day of class.
If you are new to our campus (or just not aware of all of the resources available to Palomar College students), you can find a lot of valuable information about campus life and student-support services on the Student Services website. The latest information on COVID-19 updates related to the college is also available online.
I hope you will have a really great semester! There is so much you will learn in a sociology class that relates to people’s everyday lives and to many important issues currently in the news. By the end of the semester, you may even decide to switch your major to sociology if you are currently majoring in a different field! But even if you don’t switch, I think you will be glad that you started to develop what sociologist C. Wright Mills referred to as your “sociological imagination.”
I really look forward to teaching you!
Professor Kalyna Lesyna