SUMMARY:
A. My hope is that this is a fun and uplifting course.
B. You do not need to purchase a textbook for this class. All reading assignments are online and they are free.
C. This is a one credit-hour course and runs from 9/19/22 to 10/7/22. We have 19 days to complete the class. My wish is that everyone gets an A in this class.
D. By mandate, a one credit-hour college course is required to hold 800 minutes of classtime. That equates to a little more than 13 hours.
E. This course is entirely online and there is no specific time that you need to be online. You could complete everything in the middle of the night if you wish.
F. You are welcome to contact me via e-mail 24/7 for any questions that come up (rhunckler@sc4.edu) and please use your SC4 e-mail when contacting me. If phone conversations work better for you, then we can arrange for that at a reasonable hour.
G. There will be reasonable homework assignments, discussion board assignments and a final paper assignment where you will need to summarize everything in the course (in your own words). I consider the lecture videos to be classtime along with the group discussions. Some of the lecture videos are documentaries, so you don't have to listen to me for 13 hours.
H. All homework assignments should be completed on your own time and turned in by the due dates.
I. There will be reasonable reading assignments as well that do not count towards the 13 hours.
J. You are paying the tuition for this class and I am getting paid to teach you about Viewing the Earth from Space. So if you have questions at any point along the way, please let me know. I am working for you.
K. The Discussions will be held in Canvas, but just about everything else will be housed on a separate website (obviously, this page is on that external website). If you go to the following link, and click on the globe that says GEO 176 (top right), you will find everything you need to complete this course:
I'm really looking forward to this class!
L. The following is a quote from Carl Sagan. He was referring to an image of the Earth that was taken by Voyager 1 as it sailed past Saturn in 1990. The camera briefly turned to take a picture of this tiny speck of light:
"Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there . . ."
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