Hi everyone, my name is Michael Chan and this course is East Asia is Culture and History, that is AEAS 177, AHIS 177, and this is the Fall 2024 semester. If you're thinking about the CRNs, the CRN is 8547 for I believe the EAS section and 8548 for the HIS section. Once again, welcome to this course. I'm looking forward to learning with you across the next semester and let's get started.
So I want to talk a little bit first about this course and what it's doing and why we have it. So this is a general survey course that is an introduction to the East Asian region. For our purposes we think about the East Asian region as China, Japan, and Korea, these three major countries of the region.
And the course is going to survey these sort of national and transnational cultures and heritages of the region. what exactly are these different cultures like, how do they interact with each other, what sort of historical backgrounds do they have, and in what ways do we see these cultures manifest in sort of tangible objects and tangible things like works of art, works of literature, and what ways are they affected by the other major power that's influential particularly across the 20th century, which is of course the West. And so we look at this region mainly in a historical perspective, thinking about things like language, philosophy, religion, and art.
And so we want you to think about, again, how do people in the region view themselves and each other? How do they think about the world? How do they interact with themselves and people outside the East Asian region? What sort of cultural works do they produce?
And how exactly do we, whether we're inside East Asia or outside East Asia, think about and value these cultural products and historical contributions of these nations and this region. In general, we think about this course as a knowledge acquisition course. Our goals for this course are generally to get you to a basic level of understanding about the East Asian region and the various countries that comprise it.
So we want you to think about how do I like How do I learn this knowledge? How do I start to make connections for myself? And what do I see when I see these things?
So our primary goal here is to make sure that everyone gets up to a basic level of understanding about the region. And so that's reflected in the course format where we are primarily a quiz-based course for this online course and we're thinking a lot about are you learning about concrete facts about the East Asian region. And so that's the main purpose of what we're doing here.
And I was one of the original five professors who helped to design this course. And so this is something that I'm particularly interested in working through with everyone as well. All right.
So a couple of quick disclaimers. We are a 100-level course, of course, but we are a rigorous course. We're designed to be the equivalent of a rigorous in-person course.
There is no in-person component of the course, so we want to make sure that you engage thoughtfully and understand the course materials. So we do assess student engagement in detail and intensively, which is using these quizzes, right? Students in the past have reported that they put more time studying for this course than for advanced courses in their major due to the nature of the assignments and the exams. Our expectations are probably the same as all face-to-face courses for a three-credit class. Students should be studying or working on course material for about six hours a week, and we've designed this course with that expectation in mind.
Okay, and I'll go into a couple more details about the course format and other structural things in just a second. For right now, let's start from a very basic thing, which is how do you get to the course website. Many of you may be incoming first-year students, and you might not yet have figured out Brightspace or how to get there.
So I'll just do a quick introduction about how to access the site from here. So what you want to do, we're here on the UAlbany homepage, and you want to go into the upper right hand corner and click on My UAlbany. It should take you to this website here, and you'll see a couple of different options.
Everyone's probably going to go into My UAlbany for students. I would go into My UAlbany for employees, but you can also in this bottom area under the listings here, see this list of specific links that you can go to, and of course one of these is Brightspace. If you want to bypass all that you can go to brightspace.albany.edu.
It's going to take you of course to the sign in screen. I'm going to log in for myself here. then, oh, it will be nice to me today. And here we go. It should take you to this overall website, which is the launch pad for Brightspace itself.
I'm going to quickly switch myself into learner mode so you will see what you're supposed to see when you get in here. You'll see under the Fall 2020 Choice Report Semester the name of the class. You just click it, it will take you in, and you'll end up something on a page like this.
This is the course landing page or the course home page. and you'll see a couple of different features. There's a marquee that goes across the top of the screen which has a list of different sections of the course.
I'll talk about this in just a second. You'll also see a couple of hopefully helpful views in this main launch page or landing page, excuse me. The first is the content browser in this upper left hand corner. It's a quick way to access all the content of the course. If you click on different labels, it will take you to the different sections in the content area in Brightspace itself.
Not my favorite way to access this material, but if you know where you want to go and you want to quickly get there, this can be really helpful. After that, under that, you'll see a calendar. The calendar has two different drop-down menus. The first one above it is a calendar.
And what you notice about the calendar is that there'll be certain days with blue dots under them and these blue dots usually mean that there's an assignment due on that day so it's a visual way to see if an assignment due date is coming up specifics of it you have to actually click out click on it to see and what it will do is it will pop into the bottom drop down menu which in general is going to be a list of upcoming events and it will project maybe out for the next like month or so it looks like of upcoming due dates for assignments. If you click on a specific date here, this view will change to show you what is due on that day. So these are two ways to keep up with the assignments of the course.
If neither of these really helps for you, under that is a work to do section, which actually lists upcoming due dates for the week, if I recall. It should have direct links to the assignments themselves. I don't recommend going through in this way for reasons I'll explain later. On the right hand side you should see an announcements list.
It will show a list of announcements for the course. Later on when there are actual announcements to display, the announcements section will show these announcements. So please keep an eye on this as well. All right, going up to the marquee, there are a couple of different sections that we should pay attention to.
The first one is of course the announcements section which will show you a list of announcements for the course. Announcements in general will be released on Friday mornings and it should be sent to you via email. So please get into the habit either checking your email regularly on Fridays or going to the course website on Fridays to see what the new announcements are. The announcements will list assignments, they will list assignment due dates, they'll list introductory material that I want you to think about as you start different units of the course. They'll also have important tips and tricks for doing well in the course.
so please make sure to read through the announcements and the material there. Next to the announcements section, we have the content browser. The content page will take you to a list of all the material for the course, and you can see that here in the content page. We'll come back to this in a second.
All right, after that, assignments, discussions, we're not going to use these pages. Quizzes will produce a list of all the quizzes for the course. It will make a note of when the due dates are, it will make a note of whether you've made an attempt on the assignment, and will tell you if there is feedback on the assignment.
So if you're looking for accessing grades or looking at attempts, you can actually look here on the quizzes page. If you can't find what you want grade-wise here, you can then click the grade section also in the marquee and it shows you a list of your progress in the course and all the grades here. So this is a place to check all your grades. You can check and see what you got right, what you got wrong, what you missed.
I'll tell you about how to do that in just a second. Alright, so this is the general format of what the course is going to look like. So let's talk about some of the introductory information. The first thing that you want to do when you click into this site for the first time is of course go to the content area and go to the start here section.
The start here section has a lot of information for you that might be kind of helpful and it has among other things a copy of the course syllabus. The course syllabus is a pdf document that's essentially the code of a paper syllabus that you would get in a regular class in an in-person class. It should be considered the definitive document of the course so if there's any discrepancies between what's on the website and what's on the course syllabus I usually will go by what's in the syllabus.
That said I've tried to update this course introduction area the start here area. to have much of the same information as the paper syllabus. Make sure to check both, just in case.
But a lot of information from the course syllabus is already reproduced in the Start Here section. Okay, so this will be the first place you want to click in. You can see the course description here, the course format disclaimer.
I've already gone through these a bit earlier, right? So just as a reminder, for this course, you're going to be watching video lectures, doing assigned readings, and completing quiz assignments based on those two things. In general, there are two quiz assignments due every week, usually but not always on Mondays and Thursdays. So always check the calendar, always read the announcements that I send. It's really crucial that you keep up to date with these homework assignments.
Late homework assignments are only acceptable for documented medical excuses or other unavoidable emergencies. And in fact, all the homework assignments are available for you to do now. The only things that are actually time limited are the two exams, the midterm exam and the final exam for the course.
Everything else you're able to do from this moment on up until the date in which the assignment is due. We generally recommend going through the course in a linear manner, going through in the order in which things are listed in the course. But if you want to jump around and do things that might interest you a bit more first, you're certainly able to do that, provided that you keep up with the actual due dates of the assignments themselves.
Once the deadline for an assignment is passed, it's sort of hard and we consider it... final. So we won't really make exceptions for technical failures. We're not going to curve the course.
There is no individual extra credit. If you don't feel like you could put the time and effort in to earn your grade for this course, please consider a different course. If we look below that, here's some instructor information.
My name is Michael Chan. I'm the instructor of record for fall 2024. Under here, there's a list or descriptions of all the five professors who put together from the course, including me. And, but because I'm the instructor of record, if you do have any questions about the course, please contact me directly. I should be, I guess, the first person that you check in if you have any questions or problems. The other instructors are busy and may not be able to respond to your emails or probably will just forward the email on to me.
So contact me first. I'm happy to help you. Yeah, whatever you need.
Okay, let's see what else. Alright, the general ed requirements. I'm sure that you've read these many times before, so nothing new there.
We present everything through Brightspace, all readings, homework assignments, and exams. Everything's done through Brightspace. You don't need a physical textbook.
Okay, so for this course you're asked to view all lectures and complete all reading assignments, and we assess that through your completion of three things. Regular quiz assignments, which are timed assessments for each learning module. They're due twice a week as I said before, generally on Mondays and Thursdays with some exceptions. Quiz assignments are generally due at 1159 p.m.
on days that they're due. If you fail to submit an assignment on time, it will result in a grade of zero for that assignment. So in general, we don't allow make-ups unless something extreme happens.
Please make sure to give yourself time to do these assignments. In general, students have 30 minutes to complete these quiz assignments, and that's 55% of the grade. We'll drop the lowest two scores at the end of the semester. Next is a map assignment, which is coming up in about two weeks. That's a matching quiz assignment based on identifying major cities and areas of interest in the East Asian region.
So it's a matching quiz. It's 5% of the grade. And then finally, two exam components, a midterm exam that's 20% of the grade and a final exam that is 20% of the grade.
And these will test you on the first and second halves of the course respectively. So the final is not cumulative across the entire semester. The midterm tests the first half of the course.
The final tests the second half of the course. The midterm exam for this semester will be on October 11th. That's a Friday. And the final exam for this semester will be on December 13th. That's also a Friday.
So please make sure that you are available to sit for the exams on those dates. Please make sure now. And if something is going on, please contact me immediately. Waiting until the week before to tell me that you can't take the exam is not a acceptable in this case. So please make sure that this is something that you check in.
Finally, one note, all of these grades are circumscribed by a professionalism course component. In the past, we've had problems with students being sort of outright rude to instructors, as if this was like an anonymous forum on the internet. So, some flaming, some other things that weren't particularly great. So please conduct interactions with the instructor in a respectful and polite manner that recognizes the instructor as a human being, as the instructor aims to do with everyone in the class.
I reserve the right to reduce your final course grade at my discretion in the event of unusually unprofessional interactions, such as abrupt or rude emails, failing to show up for arranged online meetings, and so on and so forth at my discretion. Initial emails to the instructor should lead more to the site of formal letters rather than texting. You may not be informed of a grade reduction.
Alright, so I'll talk about how to navigate the course in just a second. The grade scale for this course, it's an adjusted grade scale. It's not the same as the college's standard grading scale.
So 90 to 100 percent is an A, 87 to 89 percent is an A-, 83 to 86 percent is a B+, 80 to 82 percent is a B, 77 to 79 percent is a B-, 73 to 76 percent is a C+. 70 to 72% is a C, 67 to 69% is a C-, 63 to 66% is a D+, 60 to 62% is a D, 57 to 59% is a D-, and 0 to 56% is an E. So you can think about it as the college's standard grading scale, but everything is bumped down a level. Final grades are determined by rounding to integer values, which is rounding half up. So if you have a 0.5, it rounds up.
If you have a 0.4, it rounds down. And in general the grading process is like this. Brightspace will apply, will grade for you and will tabulate your grades across the semester.
I wish they did it better. It's not very good at giving students a way to see how they're doing in the course. So you'll probably have to do some calculations by yourself if you want to keep up with your progress in the course.
But at the end of the semester, I take the raw grades that Brightspace provides, and I recalculate them myself, usually in Microsoft Excel. So you can think about me as like a check on Brightspace. And so don't worry, it's not simply that you fill things in, and whatever you end up with in Brightspace is what your grade ends up being, though that is more often than not the case. I also re-tabulate your grades by hand, just to make sure that everything is on the up and up.
Some general grading information that you might want to pay attention to. You do need to make sure to click the submit button on all assignments. Don't just simply do the questions and exit the quiz that you're taking. Make sure that you press submit quiz, and I believe there's a second interstitial window that says submit quiz as well. So make sure that you submit everything properly or else the grade doesn't register in Brightspace.
It can be difficult for us to figure out. what's going on in a bright space attempt that's left open. So please make sure to do this for the benefit of your grade as well. I suggest completing quiz assignments immediately after you watch the lecture and do the reading, rather than waiting until before the hard deadline. As I said before or earlier, there is no curve in this class.
There are no individual extra credit assignments. In the highly unlikely event that I offer extra credit, it will be something that I offer to the entire course. I do keep a close eye on your grades, but please proceed with the above conditions in mind. No late quiz assignments will be accepted, no makeup exams allowed, except in the case of emergency, death in the family, or extreme illness.
All requests must come with written documentation. In the event of a technical glitch, I have final discretion involving student retakes and makeups. In general, if there's a technical glitch, I want to say that we'll allow the first one for this semester, and then after that you should really know how to...
figure out what's going on with doing assignments in Brightspace. Please understand these conditions will be adhered to stringently in this online course format and the syllabus will be the reference point by which such requests will be considered. Alright, general course guidelines.
The syllabus is a non-negotiable contract. I agree to teach the topic listed in the course syllabus and to assess you fairly on assessment criteria. If you participate in this course you agree to take part in and engage with the course material and submit your work for assessment. as well as complete this course fully and to the best of your ability or accept responsibility for not completing the work. I consider a grade of incomplete to be for documented emergencies, not for...
Students who plan to fail, who fail to plan ahead, excuse me. If you have a documented disability with the Disability Resource Center in which to request accommodation, please disclose to the instructor within the first two weeks of class. All discussions are confidential. Students who are unable to complete a homework assignment or take an examination on the designated day because of religious beliefs will be afforded equivalent opportunities for makeup homework and or exams in accordance with New York State education law.
Okay, some general Brightspace stuff. I think that Brightspace is reasonably resilient. For those of you who are a little further up the academic ladder, we used to use Blackboard, which was something. That said, even Brightspace glitches sometimes.
If something happens while you're doing an assignment, contact me immediately. I'm going to ask you to provide proof, usually in the form of screenshots, in the event of such glitches. So if you're on a Windows PC, you can press the Windows button and the Print Screen button. If you are using a Mac, Shift-Command-3, I believe.
These are the keyboard shortcuts for full screen capture. Any further action is up to me. It's at my discretion.
Please take a moment now or after you're done watching this video and confirm all the due dates in advance. You can get an overview of all the course due dates in the syllabus or in the calendar section, which is accessible from the sidebar. All major assignment due dates should also be visible from the quizzes section of Brightspace.
In addition, you should receive weekly announcements, which are generally released on Friday each week, outlining the upcoming due dates for the week. it's your responsibility to confirm all the due dates. And once these due dates pass, your grades may be viewed in the grade section on the Brightspace course site. Exam results we don't release online and you can discuss them via online appointment only.
So if you want to talk about your exam result, you need to make an appointment with me. Brightspace grades should be the equivalent of the final grade with all drop and other grading policies implemented, like I said before. I will cross-check your grades manually at the end of the semester before entering them. All right, all course videos may be accessed through Brightspace. The videos are streamed through YouTube but are unlisted on that website.
It's your responsibility to make sure you are in a location with reliable internet connection and you can view the videos. Failure to complete assignments because of an inability to view the course lectures is unacceptable. All right, and then some information on the quizzes and the exams. As we said before, Quizzes have a time limit of 30 minutes. They're timed quizzes.
They're not open-ended homework assignments. They're designed to test your knowledge of the relevant class materials in an efficient manner. All quizzes are due at 11.59pm. Exams are timed assignments with time limits of 80 minutes.
The midterm exam is based on material from the first half of the course. The final exam is based on the material from the second half of the course. We generally open the exam windows on the day of the exam at 9am, and you have until 11.59pm.
to take them. 11 59 pm is when the assignment closes, not the latest time at which you can start the assignment. If I recall correctly, all assignments are designed to submit automatically at 11 59 pm, so you need to give yourself full time to complete the work before it gets submitted.
It's my expectation that you will complete the quiz assignments and exams without assistance from other people. Although you are permitted to access the course materials, while working on these assignments. So the course is open book, open note, but it's not open cooperate.
So please do not work with other people on these assignments. In order to maintain fairness and to deter unauthorized collaborations, all quizzes and exams must be completed in one attempt. Multiple answer questions, so if there is a certain format of question in the quizzes where there can be multiple answers that are correct.
We grade these according to what Brightspace calls correct solutions, in which they say points are evenly distributed across all the answers. Learners earn partial points for each answer correctly selected and left blank. So in a multiple answer question, you must select all the correct options and leave all the incorrect options blank in order to receive full credit. So if, for example, you select one correct option and one incorrect option in a multiple answer question with four options, it'll get you...
half credit because you got one right and technically you got another one right because you left the correct one blank but you also got two incorrect because you select an incorrect option and you left an option that should not have wait that should have been selected not selected all right um if i discovered that you collaborated with others on any assignment or exam or committed any other form of academic honesty as defined in the undergraduate bulletin You will receive a zero for that assignment and I will file a violation of academic integrity report with the undergraduate dean's office. This is a pain for me. I will make it a pain for you. Please do not cheat in this class. I would really appreciate it.
Thank you. Okay, so that's the main run-through of the course introduction page. Let's see what I just need to tell you. Okay, so as far as the weekly running of the course, here's what I would like you to do.
So every Friday, the best option to do is Friday morning, come to the website or check the announcements or read the announcement that you get in email. And then after that, of course, you'll want to click into the content section and click into the learning module for that section. hypothetically speaking, Introduction to East Asia, right?
You'll see a link to a lecture video on YouTube so we can click in here and take a look at the lecture video. This is the opening lecture video by Professor Fessler. There are a couple of features I want to point out here on the YouTube page and one of them is of course subtitles, which is that you can turn on subtitles and closed captions for all the videos by going to the lower right hand corner of the video and clicking this.
the CC button which turns on subtitles and closed captions for the video. These are not auto-generated by YouTube, likely like the subtitles for this specific video, but we actually went through manually and input all the correct subtitles and corrected everything. So hopefully this is helpful for you as we go as you go through the work of the course.
Why the subtitles are important? Not only just so it's easier for you to follow the course lecture, but it also enables us to use the transcript of the video. So if we click the more button in the description of the video and we go to the bottom you see transcript you can click show transcript and the transcript is going to show up to the right side of the video.
We think the transcript is really helpful. It's a list of all the subtitles in the video and what's interesting or what's neat about it is that if you click on a subtitle in the transcript section it's actually going to jump to that moment in the video itself. And so you can quickly use this to find information. So hypothetically speaking, you want to learn about, I'm trying to think about something important, cars in China, right?
So you could actually go to Command F or the Find in Page and click Car or type in cars, right? And it will actually search in the transcript for the word cars. And in this case, We can talk about the number of cars on the road in China. So if you're looking for this information, it's a quick way to find the information in the video itself.
This is something that a lot of students don't know about despite my talking about it, so I just wanted to remind you of it here. The other thing that might be helpful is that, okay, so we've watched the video, and we want to look at the information for, no this is a bad one, let's pick a different module. We want to look at the readings for this unit. So if you want to click on...
no, these are both work. Let's see what we show. So this should take us to the PDF of the reading itself. In this case, it's a scan from Shaanxi's China Empire and Civilization. And this is the PDF reading that you're going to complete, and you need it to do the quizzes.
One thing that we also took care to do is we OCR'd everything. So we did optical character recognition. So all the text in all these PDFs is selectable, which also means that you can actually search within the PDF.
It's a little harder to do in browser, sometimes it's better to download the PDF, but spirits. You can actually search the text of the PDF as well. So if you are wondering, I see that there's a question. in one of the quizzes that's talking about something specific, right, like 庄子. And I want to see if I can find the information in this reading that's talking about 庄子.
You can actually use the find option in your PDF viewer or browser to find all instances of the name 庄子 appearing in the reading itself. All right, so this could also be really helpful if you're searching for information on this page. All right.
So the videos and their transcripts, their readings and their searchable PDFs. Once you've actually done this work, what you're going to do then is click on the quiz for the unit. The quiz will take you to, well I already did this one so that's coming up later, the quiz will take you to a screen that looks like this.
And you'll click start quiz and you'll get a chance to go through all the questions of the quiz. Make sure to press submit afterwards. I think usually On the final question and also another submit confirm screen. All right, and so it'll submit your grades and grade your assignment. It should produce, or it should return to you immediately after pressing the submit button, the grade that you got on the assignment.
And if you are looking for a way to check your grades, one way that you can do that is go to the quizzes section in Brightspace, and on this screen again you'll see a list of all the quizzes and exams in this table. In the column labeled evaluation status, that's right here. Next to the one containing assignment names, you'll see the label feedback on attempt for all assignments that have been completed with the due date passed. So you click this and then you click attempt one, which should be the only attempt that is available to you under individual attempts. And because the due date of this, well, first things first, it'll show you the grade that you got, the attempt score and the overall grade that you got.
So they should both be the same number because you only have one attempt. There's a second release date. So if you come back to the same page after the deadline for the assignment has passed, after the due date for the assignment has passed, it should show you the results of the quiz as well. So it'll show you a list of all the questions and the correct and incorrect answers for each one of the questions.
So remember that with these quizzes there are two different dates in which we're going to return a grade or grade information to you. The first time is immediately after you submit the assignment where you'll see the grade itself. The second time is after the due date of the assignment in which you should be able to see the questions of the assignment and what you got correct and incorrect.
Okay, so I think that's it for me, but very quickly, so for this first week, the first thing that you should do is look through the information in the Start Here page. All right, looking through this information is important because among other things, if you I believe that you need to do something, you need to actually click on every one of these links, if I recall, right? By clicking on each one of these links in the Start Here page, what it's going to do is it will unlock the syllabus quiz for you. The syllabus quiz is one of the first quizzes of this upcoming week, along with the quiz of the Introduction to East Asia. I have gated the syllabus quiz, as I said, requiring you to click on all these different links.
You should see a check mark appear when you do that. So, of course, on a disclaimer, go back or you can keep clicking forward. It will turn into a check mark.
And the main reason why I'm doing this is to make sure that you actually read through this material yourself. I know it's a repeat of the stuff in the paper syllabus, and I know it's a repeat of the stuff that I'm telling you in this video. There are parts of the video in which I'm just reading off the webpage, but I really want you to look through this stuff for yourself because it's really important. 90% of questions that we get are from students who have just sort of rushed into the content straight, who aren't looking at the syllabus, who aren't looking at this preparatory material. And this stuff is kind of important.
We are trying to tell you about the course policies, how to do well in the course, how to be successful in the course. And so it's just my way of trying to force you to do this. And more often than not, students who complain at the midterm, oh, my grade is not doing well, what's going on?
And it's like, what? it's you didn't take the syllabus quiz which means that you didn't do any of the stuff that i asked you to do at the beginning of the course so please make sure to do it it's really important and what that will do is it will unlock the syllabus quiz it will unlock yeah it will unlock mainly the first syllabus quiz so you will do the syllabus quiz and you will do the quiz on the introduction to east asia for this upcoming thursday all right i'm trying to think of this anything else i need to tell you about the course nothing strikes me at the moment um but if you have any questions please don't hesitate to reach out i'm happy to field questions via email i'm also happy to set up meetings with you over zoom or microsoft teams whatever platform works with you i know that it's an online course and there's a certain amount of distance that gets created between teacher and student as a result but i really do want everyone to succeed and i'm really committed to helping you learn otherwise i wouldn't be teaching this course for as long as i have so please feel free to reach out with whatever questions you have all right With that in mind, I guess I'm just letting you guys go. So, good luck, and keep me posted.