By Stacy Palen

As I think about what I usually do in lecture, in order to try to capture some of it for the online experience, a few book-related things come to mind. There are a few things I do for each chapter, as general practice:

• I provide students with an overview of each chapter.
• I guide students to focus on what I think are the most important points.
• I spend time orienting them to complicated figures.

All three of these things can be done in a video mini-lecture that students can watch before they read the text. To be clear, watching the video is not a replacement for reading the text. It’s just a way to lead them into the material.

I’ve started preparing five-minute video introductions to each of the chapters in Understanding Our Universe, Third Edition. These introductions page through the chapter, highlighting the text and figures that students should pay special attention to, because I know they will come up again. For example, I know that the cosmological principle will be referenced multiple times throughout the book. So, in the Chapter 1 video, I make students aware that they should pay special attention to that concept.

The first two videos, for Chapter 1 and Chapter 2, are linked.

Let me know what you think, and if you find these resources useful! Like all of you, I’m working away in my office here, trying to anticipate the coming semester as much as possible. I suspect that “Future Stacy” will be very grateful to “Past Stacy” if I can get some things prepared now and free up some time during the semester itself.