There are no live lectures or required meeting times for this course. Instead, your lectures are pre-recorded. We cover (roughly) one module per week. Each module will cover one main topic in Cognitive Psychology (e.g., Memory), and will include multiple micro-lectures covering a range of sub-topics (e.g., short term memory).

You can find the modules in the Course Planner below. Each module has a page that will include links to the materials for that module (hosted in Teams).

Your exams will be hosted in Qualtrics and you can access them via eLearning. Questions won’t be completely traditional - they will require you to reflect on and find connections between the topics we cover.

You will be able to choose what material you’re the most comfortable with and show me where you shine. Show me that you have been interacting with the class materials enough that you are actually absorbing the information.

Your exams do not compose the majority of your grade. Madness! But again, the exams are designed to measure how much you dug into the material, not how much you can memorize, recite, and promptly offload after submitting the exam.

Instead of writing a paper or an article review... pretend you’re creating a short, educational video on one of the subtopics we’ve talked about (or something closely related) for a group of middle-schoolers. Your audience is completely new to the psychology scene, so they need you to explain things at a level they can pick up on.

Pick a subtopic that you want to know more about. Learn more about it. Teach the imaginary middle school class what you learned.

Keep it informal, but appropriate. Keep it real: real in the sense that your research on the topic needs to be legit. A reference to at least one academic journal article is necessary. Keep it at 5 minutes(ish) - no more than 10 minutes.

It doesn’t need to be all “academic” looking if you don’t want it to be. This is a casual presentation. Think about the best way to teach the topic and go for it. It can be PowerPoint slides with narration or narrative text; you can go TED talk style; you can sit in front of the camera and talk; you can do a video and/or audio interview with the author of a paper; you can use figures from papers, humor, demos... whatever.

Just show me that you took some time to learn a bit more about something from the course by doing your own research. Distilling complex information into a format that a non-scientific audience can understand/apply is a great way to show me your grasp of a topic.

The project is due as stated in the Course Planner. Once you find a topic of interest, run it by me and go for it.