Hello, Spring 2026 Intersession students! I look forward to teaching you this coming semester (January 5-31, 2026). I have been teaching this course online for more than 15 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.) Although the course is asynchronous, it is not self-paced. You will need to do a certain amount of work each week, and I don’t make all of the class materials for the entire semester available to you at the beginning of the semester; instead, I “release” material week by week. For detailed information about my course, please read the message below to the end (where you will see my name).
This course, like most three-unit college courses throughout the U.S., requires approximately 144 hours of work for the typical student. Because this is an extremely short four-week course, you will need to spend approximately 36 hours per week on this course. If you don’t have sufficient time during the coming semester, please take the course in a different semester when you have more time available.
If you have never taken an online course before, please read the information on the Introduction to Online Learning page to help you figure out if you would do well in an online course.
We will be using Canvas, a web-based learning-management system, for this course. If you are not familiar with using Canvas, I strongly recommend watching the short video titled “Canvas Overview” from the Canvas Tutorial Video Series.
If you are registered for the Spring Intersession course, you will have access to our specific course site in Canvas at 12:01am on Monday, January 5. If you register after the course officially starts, you should have access to our Canvas site within three hours after you officially register for the course, assuming you register in the first few days of the course. Please note that people who join the course late don’t get extensions on assignment due dates, so it’s very important to register for the course 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 often 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 may enroll in the course. Your cooperation in this matter is greatly appreciated!
If you are already registered in one of my Introduction to Sociology online course, 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 read this are not yet registered for the course but wish to enroll. If the course is not full and you decide to add, go ahead and do so online through MyPalomar (eServices). If there are no current openings, continue to try each day to enroll. If an official waitlist is still in effect, try to get on it. As some currently enrolled students change their plans before the semester begins and officially drop the course, others are transferred from the waitlist to the official roster, thereby creating 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 for 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 the class), go to the Canvas login page. If that link does not work, go directly to the Palomar College homepage and click the word CANVAS in the top-right corner of the page. Please note that 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 once, and the process should take only a few minutes. 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 about sociology 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 quizzes that will cover assigned articles and videos. You don’t have much choice on when to take the Final Exam; you will have to take it online on Saturday, January 31st, at the time of your choice. You will have much more control over when you take the quizzes; typically, you will have seven days to pick from to take each of the quizzes. You will also have some writing assignments to do during the semester. Directions on how to take online quizzes and how to post to the Discussion Board can be found in FAQs documents on our homepage in Canvas.
There are two required textbooks for this course. The main textbook, titled Society: The Basics (16th ed.), is by John J. Macionis. The copyright year is 2024. (You do need this specific edition of the textbook.) Please make sure you don’t get our required textbook mixed up with Macionis’s more extensive textbook titled Sociology.
You can buy access to the Macionis textbook through our campus bookstore or directly through the Pearson website. The Macionis textbook is published in digital form (referred to as an eBook or eTextbook) and is also available in print form (to rent with the option to buy). It does not matter to me whether you get access to the book in print form or digital form. If you are going to purchase access to the digital form, it also doesn’t matter if you pay for access for the basic eBook version (what is called the eTextbook on the Pearson website) or the Revel eBook version, but if you buy the Revel eBook version, you will need the course invite link. Please note that if you purchase access to the basic eTextbook on the Pearson website, there is a minimum six-month subscription ($9.16 per month, as of December 2025). If you are buying access to a digital version of the textbook directly through Pearson (the publisher), you will have to create a Pearson account (or sign in with an existing one), and then follow the directions to buy instant access with a credit card or PayPal account.
I will not be using any calendars, quizzes, or assignments that might be found on the publisher’s Revel textbook site, nor will I be assigning any of their videos. I have my own calendar, quizzes, assignments, and video links in Canvas.
The second textbook, titled Gang Leader for a Day: A Rogue Sociologist Takes to the Streets, is by Sudhir Venkatesh. It is published by Penguin, and the copyright is 2008. You can find a photo of the textbook cover on the Amazon website. This book is available at our campus bookstore and at many online bookstores. This is a very popular book in the U.S., so I imagine it would be easy to find secondhand copies online.
You should try to have your textbooks on the first day of the semester. Reading assignments in the Macionis textbook start as soon as the semester begins. If necessary for financial reasons, you could wait to buy the Gang Leader for a Day book until a little later in the semester. Please note that it is always your responsibility to have access to the required textbooks.
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.
I hope you will have a really great semester! There is so much you will learn in a sociology class that relates to people’s everyday lives and to many important issues currently in the news. By the end of the semester, you may even decide to switch your major to sociology if you are currently majoring in a different field! But even if you don’t switch, I think you will be glad that you started to develop what sociologist C. Wright Mills referred to as your “sociological imagination.”
I really look forward to teaching you!
Professor Kalyna Lesyna