ECON 5 Online

Overview

Important Announcements for Fall 2025

Economics 5, Introductory Statistics for Economics, Business and Social Sciences, is available as a fully online course, with no on-campus meetings and no scheduled Zoom sessions. It is entirely asynchronous, but you need to complete assignments every week and you should plan to work on the course nearly every day, so it is not entirely self-paced. The online course covers all of the same topics as the traditional lecture course, including descriptive statistics, probability theory, inferential statistics and simple linear regression. 

There will be three sections of the fully online version of ECON 5 in Fall 2025. The sections are numbered 831, 832 and 833. The corresponding CRNs are 71217, 71218 and 72822. All three sections are identical. Please register for whichever section has the most space available, or, if all sections are full, the one with the shortest waitlist. Typically, all sections of the online course fill up before the end of registration, so register as soon as you are eligible if you want to reserve a spot in the class. If all waitlists are full, you should check every day to see if a spot opens on the waitlist. If not, you can do a Class Add Request on MyRam on Saturday, August 16, 2025.

There will also be one in-person section of ECON 5 in Fall 2025. That class will meet Mondays and Wednesdays from 2:10  to 4:25 pm. That course covers the same content, but will use a different textbook.

The online class will begin on Saturday, August 16, 2025.  Officially, it will end on December 19, 2025, but I give students an extra week or so to finish any missing assignments or exams.

The online course will be using the 2nd edition of the Discovering Business Statistics textbook, so be sure you obtain the correct edition. 

Expectations

Please note that this is a 5-unit class.  This means that a typical student earning an average grade should expect to spend an average of about fifteen hours per week over the course of the semester working on assignments for the class, including watching videos, reading the textbook, doing online homework and taking exams.  You may be able to complete the assignments for some weeks in less than fifteen hours, but in other weeks it may require a bit more time.   You will not need to spend time sitting in a classroom or commuting to campus, and you have lots of flexibility regarding exactly when you do the work each week, but the online class will take at least as much of your time every week as a traditional lecture class would.

Unlike many City Online courses, this 5-unit course begins on the same date as typical lecture courses, which, for Fall 2025, is Saturday, August 16, 2025.  It will be possible to get a bit of a head start a week or so early with some parts of the course if you so desire.  That is completely optional.   Before registering for the online course please ensure that your schedule will accommodate the workload and schedule requirements. Although this is an online course and you can work on it from any location at any time of day or day of the week, it is not entirely self-paced.  You will be required to submit assignments in a timely manner every week during the semester from August 16 to December 19.

Transfer Information

ECON 5 at CCSF is equivalent to similar courses offered in the CSU and UC systems, and is fully transferable to those universities.  Even though the course is offered under the title of Economics, it transfers to CSU and UC as a Math class, and meets the General Education requirements for quantitative reasoning for both of those systems.  For example, it is considered equivalent to STAT 2 at UC Berkeley.  It also fulfills requirements for many AA, AS, AA-T and AS-T degrees at CCSF, including the AA-T degree in Economics and the AS-T degree in Business Administration. 

Enrollment and Wait Lists

If all sections of ECON 5 are full and there is still space on the wait list, you can add your name and watch your CCSF email to see if it clears before classes start. If it does, you will have 24 hours to register before the spot is offered to the next student on the list. If it does not clear before August 16, then do a Class Add Request on August 16. Students will be admitted first-come first-serve with priority given to students who are on the official wait list as of the day before classes start.

If the wait list is full, keep checking every day because students often change their plans during the registration period and this may free up space for other students.  Any spaces that become open on the official wait list will be available first-come first-serve.  There is no unofficial wait list. You will need to keep checking to see if you can get on the official wait list.

Once the class has started you must request authorization to add using myRam Portal.  You will need to do this even if you were already on the official wait list but were not offered a spot before classes start.  Once you have been authorized,  you still need to register for the class using MyRam. The authorization itself does not register you for the class. Please add as soon as possible so you do not fall behind.

There are three fully online sections of ECON 5 available in Fall 2025, sections 831, 832 and 833.  The three sections are identical and it does not matter which one you enroll in.  You can only be on the wait list for one section of ECON 5, but it doesn't matter because everyone on the wait list will be admitted on August 16, so there is no advantage to being on more than one wait list.

Although everyone on the official wait list for any of the online sections will be offered a space in the course (as long as you request authorization to add on August 16),  the official wait list may fill up so you may need to consider other options. There is one other in-person section of ECON 5 offered in Fall 2025. Depending on your program, you may also be able to take Math 80, Math 80+Math80S, or PSYC 5, as alternatives. Check with your counselor to be sure.

Whether or not you are the official wait list prior to August 16 you will be able to request permission to add on myRam Portal on August 16.  Permission to add may be granted to up to ten students who request it for each section, but priority will be given to students who were on the official wait list as of the day before classes start .  If you do not get permission to add during the first few days of class then it is unlikely that you will be able to add and you should consider other options.  If permission is granted be sure to add right away.  It is very difficult to catch up in this class if you do not get started during the first week of classes.

Log-in instructions for Students 

This course homepage will not be used once the class starts.  Instead you will gain access through Canvas:

Go to the Canvas Logon Page.  (The URL is https://ccsf.instructure.com)

Username: CCSF ID, examples: W12345678 or @12345678

Your Canvas password is your RAM ID password.

RAM ID instructions for students (Google Doc)

If some disaster results in Canvas being unavailable, I will try to contact you by email, and I will also post an announcement here on this page with instructions. Otherwise, however, there will be no need to come back to this page once the class starts.