Spring 2012 Marriage, Family, and Intimate Relationships Students:
Hello! I am really looking forward to teaching you this semester. Please read through this message carefully all the way to the end (where you will see my name).
We will be using Blackboard, an online learning system, for this online Marriage, Family, and Intimate Relationships class. Most students find this program very easy to use. (I know that many of you are already familiar with Blackboard because it is used in many college courses.) If you are already registered in this online class, you will have access to our specific class Blackboard site on Tuesday, January 17th, the first day the semester officially begins. If you register in my online class after that date, you should have access to our Blackboard site within an hour after you officially register for the course. Try to go to our class Blackboard site on Tuesday morning, so you don’t get behind in the class assignments.
The on-campus orientation for this class is on Thursday, January 19th, from 2:00-3:00 in LL-104, in the library on the San Marcos campus. If you are already registered in my class AND already know how to use Blackboard in online classes, you are NOT required to come to the orientation on campus, but you MUST log in to Blackboard, read the announcements that are already there, and write a little bit about yourself on the Introductory Forum on the Discussion Board by 10:00pm on Wednesday, January 18th, so I know you intend to stay in the class. If you don’t either do this writing assignment by 10:00pm on Wednesday or show up at the orientation the next day, I reserve the right to drop you from the class to make room for crashers who show up at the orientation.
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 always 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, I can let another student into the course.
The official waitlist for this class holds eight people, and the last day to get on the waitlist is Wednesday, January 11th. If the waitlist is currently filled, keep trying each day through January 11th to get on it. As people who are currently enrolled change their plans and officially drop the course, others are transferred from the waitlist to the official roster, thus opening up new places on the waitlist. (Please note that this auto-transfer from the waitlist to the official roster only gets done every couple of days, so for a few days at a time it may look like the class roster has a few openings when it really does not.) On the morning of Thursday, January 12th, the people in Admissions will do the last transfer of people from the waitlist to the official roster, providing, of course, that there are any open spots in the class at that time. As noted on page 135 of 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. You should check your schedule online to confirm your status.
If you are on that official waitlist at the time the waitlist ends (at the end of the day on Wednesday, January 11th) but don’t get automatically enrolled on Thursday, January 12th (because the class is already full and there is no room for additional students), e-mail me between Friday, January 13th and Monday, January 16th (at 9:00pm), and I will give you a permission code to add the class. (What I am saying is that you are guaranteed a spot in the class if you are on the official waitlist and contact me for a permission code between those dates.) E-mail me at professorlesyna@gmail.com. Please sign your complete name to the e-mail and identify your five-digit class number (for example: Maria Gonzalez, 31695 or 30386 or 31694 or 30391). Marriage, Family, and Intimate Relationships is cross-listed in Sociology and Psychology, so there are four class numbers associated with my two classes.
If you are on the official waitlist at the time the waitlist ends and do not contact me requesting a permission code by Monday evening, January 16th (at 9:00pm), you are no longer guaranteed a spot in the class and would have to try to crash the course like anyone else who was interested in the course and not yet enrolled.
Please note that if you are not yet registered and never manage to get on the official waitlist and decide to try to crash one of my two Marriage, Family, and Intimate Relationship classes, you need to come to the 2:00-3:00pm orientation on campus on Thursday, January 19th, in room LL-104. If you don’t come to that orientation, the crashers who do show up will have priority over you with regard to being allowed to enroll in the class if there are any available spots.
To access our class information on Blackboard on or after Tuesday, January 17th, registered students should go to https://learn.palomar.edu/webapps/login/ and input your username and password from eServices in the appropriate boxes. If you successfully log in, you will come to a page with various boxes of information. The box on the left should be labeled Tools, the middle one should be labeled My Announcements, and the one on the right should be labeled My Courses. Click on the name of our course in the My Courses box.
If you go to Blackboard before Tuesday, January 17th, you may be able to log in to Blackboard and see the names of all of your courses, but you won’t be able to access our particular online course. It will not yet be activated, and you will see the word “unavailable” after the name of the course. After you have successfully clicked on the name of our course, you will eventually see purple rectangles on the left side of the page (they have titles such as FAQs, Quizzes, etc., and it may take a while for them to appear). You will also see one or more announcements (messages) from me on the right side. Read the announcements carefully for further instructions and information about the class.
IMPORTANT NOTE: All of my online students are required to come on the main Palomar campus at San Marcos to take their three major exams during the semester in a proctored environment (you will have to bring along a photo ID). Please note that I will NOT make any exceptions to this policy of taking major exams on campus. For your convenience, you will have some choices about the specific days and times when you take these exams on campus. If the Tutoring Center, where the exams are proctored, has the same proctoring hours this semester as they had last semester, you will have a choice of at least one Saturday morning and one Monday evening to take the exams (in addition to daytime hours during the week).
In addition to the major tests that you will take on campus, there will be quizzes that you will take online (you will usually have about seven days to pick from to take each quiz). You will also have some writing assignments, which will consist of Discussion Board assignments and a paper assignment. I will explain how to take online quizzes and how to post to the Discussion Board at the orientation on campus.
Whenever you e-mail me for any reason, e-mail me at professorlesyna@gmail.com. Please sign your complete name to the e-mail and identify your five-digit class number (for example: Maria Gonzalez, 31695). It’s extremely important that you include your name and the five-digit class number in every e-mail that you send to me throughout the semester. (Please note that your five-digit class number may be different from the one I used in the example above.)
It is absolutely essential that you have extremely reliable Internet access (preferably with broadband or DSL access) if you are taking an online class. If you don’t have access to a computer with reliable Internet access at home, or if your Internet access at home is temporarily unavailable at some point during the semester, there are computers available on campus for your use. (Local libraries also usually have computers available to use; however, please note that it may not be possible to watch the assigned videos on a local library’s computer.) Please note that it is your responsibility to have access to a reliable computer with reliable Internet access at all times during the semester.
This course, like almost every 3-unit college course throughout the country, requires 144 hours of work for the typical student. This means that in a typical 16-week semester, you will need to spend approximately 9 hours per week on this one course. If you don’t have this much time available this semester, you should drop the course and take it when you do have the time available.
The textbook for this class, Marriages, Families, & Relationships: Making Choices in a Diverse Society (11th ed.), is by Mary Ann Lamanna and Agnes Riedmann. It is published by Wadsworth, and the copyright is 2012. Check the copyright and edition number carefully to make sure you have the correct book. You do not need any CD or study guide that might be sold along with the textbook. This book is available in our campus bookstore. (A photo of the book cover is available online through the campus bookstore site; if you are going to buy the book somewhere other the campus bookstore, make sure you look at the photo of the book covers at the campus bookstore site to make sure you have the correct book.)
You should buy your book right away. If you go to the bookstore and they tell you the textbook is sold out, you should immediately tell them to order you a copy as it can take some time to get additional copies sent to the bookstore. The danger of waiting too long to get the textbook is that you may end up facing the first test without having the reading material you will need. It is always your responsibility to have the required textbook. Unfortunately, I do not have any extra copies of the textbook to lend to students.
If you have never taken an online class before, I strongly suggest you take a look at the following information (titled “Are you ready to be an online student?”) to help you figure out if you would do well in an online course: http://www.palomar.edu/areyouready.
If you need to contact me before the beginning of the semester about anything that is not covered above, please contact me at professorlesyna@gmail.com on or after Friday, January 13th. (Remember, all student e-mails throughout the semester should be sent to that email address.) However, please note that I do not make course materials such as the syllabus, schedule, etc., available to students before Tuesday, January 17th.
I hope you have a great semester!
Professor Kalyna Lesyna