Monday, January 19, 2009

My First Blended Course: Part 3

Having decided to create a Blended Course about Web Design at ANU, my second task was to reconcile the material which was in the previous lectures with that in the new textbook and divide all that into logical units. I decided to divide the course into two equal size components, on on web and the other networking/security (with some material on Analysis and Essay Writing, Ethics and Copyright to fit in somewhere).

An ANU semester is 13 weeks (same as an ACS one). So dividing this in half gives six weeks for each half (assuming the thirteenth week is for revision). For the web half of the course I had five topics:

Refining the "wanted" list more:
  1. The Web Environment
    • Chapter 1. Web Standards
    • Chapter 2. Designing for a Variety of Browsers
    • Chapter 3. Designing for a Variety of Displays
    • Chapter 5. Accessibility
    • Chapter 6. Internationalization
  2. The Structural Layer: XML and (X)HTML
    • Chapter 8. HTML and XHTML Overview
    • Chapter 9. Document Structure
    • Chapter 10. Text Elements
    • Chapter 11. Creating Links
    • Chapter 12. Images and Objects
    • Chapter 13. Tables
    • Chapter 14. Frames
    • Chapter 15. Forms
  3. Web Graphics and Media
    • Chapter 28. Web Graphics Overview
    • Chapter 29. GIF Format
    • Chapter 30. JPEG Format
    • Chapter 31. PNG Format
    • Chapter 33. Audio on the Web
    • Chapter 34. Video on the Web
  4. The Presentation Layer: Cascading Style Sheets
    • Chapter 16. Cascading Style Sheets Fundamentals
    • Chapter 17. Selectors
    • Chapter 18. Font and Text Properties
    • Chapter 20. Color and Backgrounds
    • Chapter 21. Floating and Positioning
    • Chapter 22. CSS for Tables
    • Chapter 23. Lists and Generated Content
    • Chapter 24. CSS Techniques
    • Chapter 25. Managing Browser Bugs: Workarounds, Hacks, and Filters
    • Chapter 36. Printing from the Web
  5. The Behavioral Layer: JavaScript
    • Chapter 26. Introduction to JavaScript
    • Section 26.1. A Little Background
    • Section 26.2. Using JavaScript
    • Section 26.3. JavaScript Syntax
    • Section 26.4. Event Handling
    • Section 26.5. The Browser Object
    • Section 26.6. Where to Learn More
So the eaiest approach would be to have one of these per week, and add another topic to make six. There were three lectures which did not fit in this structure, so they could be sued to make the extra topic:

The Social Environment
  • Lecture 9 - Topic Analysis and Essay Writing
  • Lecture 10 - Ethics and the IT Professional
  • Lecture 30 - Copyright.
These could be placed first, to give context to the course, but the student may then wonder where the web stuff is, so it might be better to put this second, after web standards and the like are introduced. Three lectures are insufficient content and so more will be needed.
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2 comments:

Unknown said...

Hmm I think it is course designs like this that make most websites technically efficient, functionally frustrating and aesthetically challenged.
No mention of the client or the user or the experience. Try considering design as a human experience, not a bunch of code.

January 19, 2009 6:43 PM
Tom Worthington said...

Red said January 19, 2009 6:43 PM:

"... course designs like this that make most websites technically efficient, functionally frustrating and aesthetically challenged.
No mention of the client or the user or the experience. Try considering design as a human experience, not a bunch of code."

This is a web design course for computer scientists, software engineers and information systems people, so it emphasises technicalities, not aesthetics.

I agree that many web sites are functionally frustrating, but my experience is that this is made worse because they are not technically efficient. By making web sites which are designed to load quickly and run on lots of different devices, that should make the user experience better.

My approach is to tell the techncial people that they should leave the aesthetics of the web site, such as colours, to someone else, with those skills. They should instead concentrate on things like making sure the web pages meet accessibility standards.

In the tutorial exercises I get them to test web sites,. I use my experience of testing the Sydney Olympics web site and providing evidence in the Human Rights Commission as an example.

January 20, 2009 1:14 PM

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