Welcome to Introduction to Psychology!
My name is Chris Dula. I have a PhD in clinical psychology,
a master's degree in clinical psychology. I got my bachelor's in psychology and
another bachelor of arts in philosophy
at UNC Charlotte and I got an associate's degree at
Central Piedmont Community College. I'm also a licensed clinical psychologist in that I have
a license to practice psychology and to work with patients to help them
make their lives better. I love to teach and I've been doing the teaching thing
for quite a while now,
since 1998, and Introductory Psychology is my favorite topic to teach.
Now, we're doing this in the studio as an introduction to the Intro to Psych class
because I wanted to give you some background before you see the actual
class.
You'll have a syllabus that'll be online. You'll be able to go through the whole
course as if you were enrolled in the course and at the end of it all
you'll have an option to take the course for credit or just to have taken it for
your own knowledge. Either is fine with me. If you take the course for credit, you
will have taken tests along the way
and in those tests you will have received grades and those grades will be
largely
the grade you would get if you take it for credit. So you have a pretty good
indicator as to how well you're doing as you go along. The grades that you get on the
test
will account for 5/6ths of your grade, and then there will be a pre-assessment which will
actually be items that are drawn from the tests you have already taken, randomly,
and then there will be a final assessment which will also be items from the tests you have taken
drawn randomly
and that final assessment will serve as a test grade and it will be averaged with your
other five tests to be your final grade
and you can get five points of extra credit doing the extra credit work that we'll
talk about later
if you want to and add that to your final grade. So you have a lot of flexibility.
I try to gear my classes to help people succeed as I hope you'll
see, and as such I hope you'll succeed.
Psychology as a subject is fascinating. It's really an amazing,
amazing subject. For me,
it really transcends all the interests that I have and ties them all together.
As such, I've actually found that my knowledge of psychology going from
Community College through to the doctoral level
has made me a better parent, it's made me a better individual, it's made me a better
teacher, it's
made me a better employee, it's made me a better citizen.
The knowledge that you'll gain from this course I hope you will be able to apply to your everyday life
and make great changes in ways that will gratify you
and lead the way for other people, and maybe bring them into this
collegiate experience, whether they take it for credit or whether they do it
as you may be doing it just for the sake of the knowledge. So a lot of the
items that I would do in the open live class that we will do as the rest the
course would not apply here so I'm doing this specialized
introduction and it's really only applicable to people who are taking this
course online.
In the videos you're going to see me change shirts occasionally
because as we cut the live videos
I would come up on the end of class and cut off in the middle of a topic
and in the beginning of the next class would be the continuation of that topic.
So we'll have those spliced together. You'll see me look at my cell phone on
occasion.
In the live class that's where I'm actually tracking time to make sure I
don't go too long on any one subject
and then I let people go on time. I try to respect people's time. I appreciate
that they take the class. I appreciate that they attend,
and I want to be respectful of their time and provide the maximum information
in the time that I'm allotted. I had to miss a couple of classes during the
course of the semester. That happens pretty regularly. I had to go to a professional
meeting
and we had some other winter weather closures and that
push us back on the schedule and I also had to
serve jury duty or get to serve jury duty in this great country of ours and
as such you'll see that there are a couple of videos that are cut in a
different classroom where I did make up lectures so
I tried to substitute in what I could.
You'll see a cart in front of me on the stage and it's got food items around it at times. That's
because
in my class I always bring a cart for people to donate food items,
never for extra credit, just for the sake of doing it,
and we have so far collected in a few semesters almost a thousand
pounds worth of food which we give to a local food bank
and if you're inclined to use that food cart up front as a reminder, which is why
I have it up front for my own class,
to donate whatever you can to any good cause, I would appreciate it.
The length of the videos that you're going to see varies between five minutes and twenty
minutes. I've cut them all. They're cut down from about
100 and... well they're cut down into about 115 or 116 videos from about forty classes.
So those 40 and 50 minute class chunks are a lot to take in at one time so what
we did was we edited them down
to more manageable chunks of information. So they range from five to
twenty minutes and they're grouped on topic.
The topics then are listed on the video titles and you can see
where you are in module one, module two, three, four, or five,
and the sub topics within those and you can then
go into your own book, which as I will explain later you should buy
but not our book necessarily, and look up those topics in the index and get
a secondary source of information besides just having my lectures.
A tertiary source would be that I also provide you with very comprehensive notes which
are all you really need but again I would encourage people to go further and
deeper.
You'll see that the videos do have some white font in them and that
those white font items are game for tests.
You will not find the white font on the notes that I provide
on the Coursera site I guess is where we're going to go to. I said D2L earlier
but whatever online platform you find this video
course in, you'll see that on-screen
as I walk around the stage some items are in white font. Sometimes I say it out
loud that it's in white font,
and sometimes you'll just see it on the screen. Those are items that you really
want to pay attention to because they're game for the tests that you will encounter
during the course. There's a lot of information to present in psychology. It used to
be a two-semester sequence to do introductory psychology.
We've boiled it down to one and I try to hit what I feel to be some of the most important
information.
You'll find other psychology professors disagree with me on that point and that they
have other
topics that they would feel are more in-line with an introductory class and
others that they might
excise from the course. But that's academic freedom. We all get to choose
what we want to convey to our students
and I have honed this class over years and years to what I find to be a very
effective
transporting of information from my learning
to hopefully your learning. So the videos
are all edited to really focus in on tests but within those videos you'll
find even more
specific information that you'll really want to know extremely well,
not just to the definitional level. You want to be able to understand those
topics well enough that you can teach them to others.
If you can teach those topics to others you should do very well on these tests that
I have put together
with the greatest of care to make sure that they are fair tests and that they assess
only information that are covered in the video portions of the
course. So, the figures you will see in the notes,
on the powerpoints that are on screen behind me, are sometimes copyrighted
information from publishers that I have accrued over times where I've adopted books
and I feel having, you know, adopted their books and having had our students buy their
books, that I I don't mind to
keep that information in behind me . However,
you will also see superimposed on the lectures some very close-up views
of PowerPoints and the figures will be different because I don't want to put
copyrighted information
anywhere where it seems like I'm benefiting from those copyrights.
That's just information that's all general to psychology.
All of that information is specific to our discipline and sometimes applies to
other disciplines but I actually created many of the figures that you'll see in the
close-up shots of myself
or I got them from Wiki Commons which is to say they are in the public domain.
I cuss on occasion. I do that as part of my natural daily life. I have a
background in construction and as a musician and
people in my background oftentimes use curse words like punctuation.
I never do it to offend. Oftentimes I'll get carried away with the passion that I have for
the subject and I'll just
be going through it and that may slip out. My intent is never to offend so I hope
you will
forgive me if it does offend and if you ever want to contact me, give me feedback,
I am very open to that. It never
offends me when people have critical feedback for me. You're welcome to email me at
any time.
Please read the syllabus. The syllabus is detailed
but it is there for your service. It will help you understand what you need to
know to succeed in this class
and to succeed in integrating this information into your life you need to
learn this information
well. So, there are five assessments, tests, as I said
a pre-assessment and a final assessment so
those make up your final grade. The pre-assessment doesn't count for a grade
but it gives you the indicator of how well you've learned the material and whether you would
like to
take that final assessment and integrate it into a final grade.
But the syllabus also has further details. It has suggested texts
in it that I think you might want to buy. I don't care if you get used texts.
The information in psychology has not radically changed in the last 10 years. I
would get a recent edition
but not a current edition necessarily. You can go onto a number of
online retailers and find used books very cheap,
sometimes for five, six, seven, ten dollars with shipping. You can definitely find
something that fits the bill
under 20 dollars. So if you will do that
it will provide you again another source of information that is highly credible
and which you should check your own learning against.
By reading the topics that I cover in the class in an introductory textbook
you'll be able to reinforce your learning and highlight any questions
that you may have where you find discrepancies between anything I may have presented
and what you're reading. That would constitute a question that I would be
happy to have you
email me. Again, extra credit is available in the course. There are a
numbers of written projects that you would
turn in through the Dropbox function and as long as those are in by 12 noon
on the last day of classes,
they can count towards your final grade. I will add up to five points as a
maximum of your final grade. If you do a combination of projects that winds up being
six credits worth, for example, I would only add five points to your final grade
because that is a half a letter grade
and you can see by my grading scale that I skew
the scale in favor of you. There's no A plus
so there is no A minus in my grading scale.
It's 90.0 to 100. Thats
an A. There's a B-minus because there's a B-plus and there's a C-minus because
there's a C-plus but
there's no D minus so there is no D plus.
So we have an A, B+, B, B-,
C+, C, C-, D and F
and you can look at the grading scale and you can see that the minuses are minimized
such that if you got five points of extra credit at any point
during the course you would be able to transcend gray categories and sometimes
jump to
and theoretically you could go as high as changing a B minus
to a B plus or a B to an A.
So, those kinds of options I try to make for people to
enhance their own grade while they also enhance their own learning.
So look again at the syllabus and extra credit document for more information on that.
Any time you have questions or comments you can email me,
that is the best way to get a hold of me. E-mail me at
d u l a c @etsu.edu
dulac@etsu.edu. That information is in your syllabus again.
You can email me comments. You can email me questions. I would encourage you to
connect with me on Facebook or on Twitter.
I just have a general connection but anytime you have an official question
about the course please email me through my official
email. I'll give you just a word of background for me
My background is in middle-class
white America. I was privileged in ways I did not understand
coming up through that, but then I more or less rejected my background and the privileges
that came with it
and I went into my own world of music
and trying to support myself I found myself in construction where I met some wonderful
people
and some not so wonderful people. The wonderful people are the ones that taught me the trades of
carpentry,
sheet rock, and vinyl floor installation. And I hold great reverence for people who
make their living through trades or service work, but it just didn't fit for me.
I didn't find a passion in it and it made the bills
but it didn't make me happy and while making music did make me happy I was
never going to pay the bills making music.
So I found myself in my early mid-twenties at a community college
and at that community college I found that what I hated in high school
was not there anymore. I had total freedom to engage material as I would, to come to
class or not come to class,
and I went to every class that I could. I think I may have missed two or three
classes total in my undergraduate experience due to things that were beyond my
control
I ate that material up. I loved learning. I didn't realize
the joy that it would bring for me to engage material on my own terms,
improve my own mind, and improve my own life, and from community college I moved through
to the local university
and from there I went to a master's degree and from there a doctoral degree,
from there to a postdoctoral fellowship
and I've been at East Tennessee State University since 2004
doing what I love for a living and I would encourage
all of you out there to find your passion in life,
it doesn't have to be psychology. Find a subject that you find completely
engaging,
immerse yourself in it, build your skills and knowledge base,
and then try to pursue a career in something that you love because as
they say, or as I like to say, if you love what you do for
work, you never work a day in your life. Thank you for being in this class
and again, contact me anytime you want! Much appreciation!