Hello, Spring 2024 students! I look forward to teaching you during the upcoming semester in my Marriage, Family & Intimate Relationships class. I have been teaching 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 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 country, requires approximately 144 hours of work for the typical student. This means that in a regular 16-week semester like ours, a typical student will need to spend approximately 9 hours per week on this course. If you don’t have that much time available this semester, please take the course during a different semester when you have more time available.
If you have never taken an online class 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 class. 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 a few semesters ago 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.
Once you are registered in my course, 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 course Canvas site within a few hours after you officially register for the course, assuming you register in the first few days of the semester. Please note that people who join the class late don’t get any extensions on due dates to finish assignments, so it’s very important to register for the class 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 usually 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 Marriage, Family & Intimate Relationships online classes, 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, so if one 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 class, go to the Canvas login page. 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 to Canvas, 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 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 on assigned articles and videos. You will also have some writing assignments on the Discussion Board. Although you must take the Final Exam online on one of two days at the end of the semester (May 24 or May 25), you will have more days—usually 7 days—to pick from to take each quiz and to do the writing assignments. Directions on how to take online quizzes and how to post to the Discussion Board can be found in the FAQs documents on our homepage in Canvas.
The textbook for this class, Marriages, Families, & Relationships: Making Choices in a Diverse Society (14th ed.), is by Mary Ann Lamanna, Agnes Riedmann, and Susan Stewart. It is published by Cengage Learning, and the copyright is 2021. Note that you do not need to buy any additional material such as a CD, study guide, etc., that might be sold along with the textbook. It does not matter if you buy ebook access (typically the cheapest option), rent a paper copy, or buy a paper copy; however, you do need the correct (2021) edition of this textbook. This textbook is available in our campus bookstore and through online sources. You can find a photo of the book cover on the publisher’s website.
If you are going to buy the book somewhere other the campus bookstore or the publisher’s website, make sure you look at the photo of the book cover at the above link for comparison, and check the copyright and edition number carefully. Also, before you buy books anywhere, you should always check for the company’s return policy.
You should try to buy your textbook before the semester begins. Reading assignments in the textbook start the first week of classes. Unfortunately, I do not have any extra copies of the textbooks to lend to students.
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 really look forward to teaching you!
Professor Kalyna Lesyna