Here is important information about the course structure, very important recommendations on how you can succeed in this class, and extremely important recommendations on how to get most out of your time investments into this class. You might want to watch them after having watched the video lectures of 1st Session- Introduction & Overview, so you already have some idea about the content.

Watch the following lecture videos:

UCCSS 1-x: What is this course about? (12min)

UCCSS 1-y: Course content overview (7min)

UCCSS 1-z: How to get most out of your time? (24min)

Here are the slides for these video lectures:

1slidePerPage_UCCSS_1stOrientation_Hilbert.pdf (one slide per page)

3slidesPerPage_UCCSS_1stOrientation_Hilbert.pdf (three slides per page)

Please feel free to create or join a study group: Study Groups Coordination

Here are some more study recommendations: Exam study orientation

For easier video review, you can also watch the videos (without questions) here at AggieVideo (you have to log in), and/or search for "UCCSS" in https://video.ucdavis.edu/ .

What do students say about the course?

"My overall impression of this was: I can't wait to use this for other stuff!!"
"I absolutely think that these tools could be used in my future jobs, or even as a personal reflection. If you scrape and analyze the comments/reactions that your business gets on Youtube, Twitter, Instagram, etc., what does their language use say about how they interact with your brand — or what your brand brings out in them?"
"Wow, this is cool and fun stuff. Even though I may not pursue anything social-science related in the near future, it is still nice to learn and get to experience all of these tools that computational social science offers and benefits in all kinds of careers and fields of study."
"As an Environmental Policy Analysis and Planning major, I was fascinated to learn that there is a feasible way to simulate policy implementation and impact multiple times within a short span of time."
"Throughout the course, the content was challenging, but when it was finally applied to the labs at the end of each module, it was really rewarding to see everything play out. It was even more rewarding when it made sense too! ... I'm really glad I took this course! It was definitely a challenge, but I'm glad I got to experience and learn about so many topics I never knew even existed."
"It was fun seeing the results of the code that I made, and I never thought that I would be doing something like this in my life. The results also showed me what the society would look like.... Social network analysis and web scraping could be the tools that I use in my future job as all the internship that I'm looking now all related to social media or digital media."
"My career aspiration is to be a digital marketing expert. These computational tools have enormous implications for the field."
"I really really loved that this class let me learn hands-on and gave me experience with tools that
have real world application and combine STEM & social science. I think that a lot of these tools are
useful far beyond homework activities."
"Best course I have taken. I wish more online courses structured like this would be offered.

P.S. why an online lecture class?

Did you know that online classes are not only convenient and flexible, but also effective? Studies have shown that converting lecture classes to the online format can be up to 20 % more effective, which means better grades. This has several reasons.

The quality of lecture presentations is better. As instructors, we have the opportunity to re-record when we notice that something didn't make much sense. Honestly, watching the videos, even we, who taught these things many times already, sometimes cannot believe what comes out of our mouths sometimes... it's quite humbling to see ourselves in the video mirror... with recordings, we can check our own quality.
The efficiency of lecture presentations is better. For the same reason as before, the instructor turns out to be more precise. Experience shows that online lectures are much shorter than the same lecture taught offline. UCCSS has 22 hours of lectures, while an equivalent offline class has more than 30 hours.
Recorded lectures allow you to build in individualized redundancy by re-watching course content according to your own needs and interests. This allows you to take better study notes, you cannot miss anything by drifting off for a moment, which means less stress, and you can watch videos at different speeds and repeat difficult sections as often as you need.
Additionally, lectures are interspersed with short interactive questions to check for understanding. Comparing the student evals of large lecture classes with their online class equivalent, students esteem the level of course interactivity to be notably higher for the online version. At the end, every class with more than some 20 students is "distance education" already. With video lectures, each student interacts with the lecture regularly.
With online exams, you have much flexibility to plan for your own individual test taking experience. You can choose the time of day you are most effective (24h a day), choose an adequate environment without the need to worry about where you'll end up in the exam hall, you do not have to move your schedule around or even be in the country because of exam dates. Just you, your test, your knowledge, and a silent webcam checking in.

In short, online lecture classes, allow for higher quality of the lecture content and a more precise and efficient delivery, for individualized interaction with the content through questions and self-chosen repetitions, and for test taking flexibility. Check it out yourself! Feedback is always welcome

About UCCSS