This class is primarily project based. There will a variety of assignments including projects, lab reports, and participation.
Every day your assignment is late, you loose 10 points.
In this class, the relative worth of your assignments are as follows:
| Website Evaluation Assignment | 100 points |
| Personal Website Assignment | 200 points |
| Final Project | 300 points |
| Quizzes | 25 points each |
| Lab Reports | 25 points each |
| Participation | 200 points |
Final grades will be assigned on an absolute scale:
| 100% | A+ |
| 92%-99% | A |
| 90%-91% | A- |
| 88%-89% | B+ |
| 82%-87% | B |
| 80%-81% | B- |
| 78%-79% | C+ |
| 72%-77% | C |
| 70%-71% | C- |
| 68%-69% | D+ |
| 62%-67% | D |
| 60%-61% | D- |
| 0%-59% | F |
Fractional grades will always be rounded up. Thus, a grade of 81.01% would be rounded up to an 82%, and the student would receive a "B".
I will calculate your final grade by adding up the number of points you have received on all of your assignments, participation, etc., and then dividing it by the total number of points you could have received. All students start out with zero points. By completing assignments and participating in the class, you will earn points as the semester progresses.
There will be opportunities for extra credit in this class. They will take one of two forms: instructor-generated or student-generated. Whatever the form, however, each opportunity for extra credit will, in general, be worth one percentage point of the final grade. This point will be added to the final grade after the final grade has been calculated using the formula provided above. However, because extra-credit opportunities are extra opportunities for credit, it is the student's responsibility to keep track of how many extra credit points they have obtained, what they were obtained for, and an account of the circumstances in which they were obtained. These accounts can be maintained as an HTML page, or in some other form, and ought to be submitted before the last day of class. No extra credit submitted after the final day of class will be counted toward a student's final grade.
Instructor-generated extra credit will usually be opportunities for earning extra credit by completing mini-assignments throughout the class. These mini-assignemnts will either be associated with existing assignments, or will be generated on the fly, at the whim of the instructor. It is up to the students if they would like to complete the extra credit assignments for the extra points. Depending on how the class goes, it is possible that no extra credit opportunities will be generated on the fly.
Student-generated extra credit will be opportunities for earning extra credit by making an intellectual contribution to the class which benefits your fellow students, and possibly the instructor as well. Student-generated extra-credit can be obtained by writing a proposal for the contribution, which will be an HTML page (stylesheets are optional) that explains the contribution, what form the contribution will take (HTML page, class presentation, other media), and how it will benefit your fellow students. If the contribution is to be a class presentation, there must be a justification of why it is worth the class's time. If the contribution is an HTML page, then there must be a justification of why your fellow students will read it. Similar kinds of justifications will be necessary for other forms of media. Because some contributions may be more ambitious than others, it is also permissible to include within the proposal a request for more than 1 percentage point of extra credit. Any such request must be accompanied with a reason that justifies why your contribution is worth more than one percentage point. When you submit your proposal I will review it within a week. Each proposal will either be accepted or rejected. I may feel that a particular proposal is not worth the requested amount of percentage points, in which case I will inform you how many percentage points it will actually be worth if completed. It is then your decision whether to follow through on the proposal to obtain the extra credit and generate the contribution. All student-generated contributions must be submitted before the last day of class, so that if I feel it is necessary or productive, we can discuss the contribution in class. Therefore, if you want extra credit, be sure to get in your proposal more than a week before the last day of class.
Unless otherwise specified, all written assignments in this class are to be completed as HTML pages.
Assignments in this class are generally pretty fixed. However, if you are interested in doing something that doesn't quite fit the assignments as they have been described here, and you think it will still allow you to demonstrate that you have learned the material in this course, then please feel free to talk to me during office hours (or make an appointment to see me), and propose your alternative assignment. I make no promises to accept your assignment, but I will give it fair consideration, and we may be able to negotiate a compromise assignment.
Assignments are due before the beginning of class on the day they are due. Do not miss class in order to complete an assignment. I would rather give you an extension than have you miss class. If you are working down to the wire and think you might miss class, email me, and I'll give you until midnight of the day the assignment is due to complete the assignment on the condition that you attend class.
Because most assignments will be webpages or websites, assignments will be submitted by uploading them to one of the web spaces used in the class, and then either emailing me the link, or posting the link to one of the class forums. Either Netfiles or the UIUC I: drive can be used for this purpose. However, the nature of the assignment may affect which location is most appropriate.
In the end, I am relatively agnostic about where the assignment lives, as long as I can read it and dowload the source if need be.
I define participation a bit differently than most other instructors. In my classes, participation is defined to be the intentional involvement in the class to improve students' learning experience. Thus, participation can take any of a number of forms:
The more people you benefit by your participation, the more credit you get. Thus, you get more credit for participating in a manner that helps both you and your classmates than you do for just helping yourself. Thus, for example, asking a question in class at the appropriate time is worth more credit than asking me during office hours, because your fellow students can both hear the question and the answer. While each individual action does not count for a set number of points, I will be keeping records of who does what, and at the end of term, I will make a qualitative judgement based on the quantitative records I have kept.
Notice what was not said, however. Participation does not have to occur solely in class. However, in order for me to give you credit for participation, I need to know about it. Therefore, if any of you work together outside of class, and you feel that a fellow student was particularly helpful, please send me a brief email noting the fact so that I can include it in my calculations of that student's participation grade at the end of the semester.
Participation in this class is worth 200 points, which is as much as a major assignment. Thus it is a very important part of your grade. Please be sure both to participate, and to tell me about your fellow student's contributions to your learning experience.
Labs in this class should be relatively straightforward. Each lab is a self-contained assignment which we will start working on in class, and which you will be responsible for finishing on your own if we do not complete it in class. Every lab will have some kind of deliverable which you will be expected to turn in. The specific instructions for how to complete and turn in each lab will be covered on the lab's assignment page. For a list of the labs we will be conducting in the class, please see the Labs page.
Labs are a nearly daily occurance in the beginning of the semester. Because I know you will be busier in the second half of the semester, I have reduced the number of labs you will be required to complete and turn in.
Currently, only one quiz is scheduled for the class. However, if students appear not to be doing the reading, I may implement pop-quizzes to ensure that readings are being completed. Alternatively, as the syllabus develops, if there is some material in the class which does not fit into a lab exercize, I may use quizzes to ensure that the material is learned.
Pick a topic, something you are interested in - like a band, actor, movie, videogame, etc. Do some searching online to find some websites about this topic. Select what you think are the top 3 pages/sites about this topic. Read and review each of these sites. Evaluate them using some "web site evaluation" schemes.
Here are some (in no particular order):
Evaluate each site according to the evaluation scheme you've selected. Create a web page for each page/site containing your evaluation marked up in HTML. Finally, create an introduction/conclusion page which introduces the topic of the sites you are evaluating, and the evaluation scheme you've chosen. Rank the three sites according to how well they performed on the evaluation scheme and provide links to each of the evaluations as well as to the evaluation scheme you selected. Also, give any overall conclusions you have. What did you think of the evaluation scheme? Was it too restrictive? How well did it apply to the genre of web page you were evaluating? Do you have any recommendations to other people who might use that evaluation scheme?
Therefore, when completed, your site should contain at minimum the following 4 pages:
If you reference any other material, provide links to those as well.
Upload it to a class webspace, either Netfiles, the GSLIS I: Drive, or your personal space. Post a link to your assignment on the Website Evaluation Assignment forum.
Are you unsatisfied with the evaluation criteria on the web? Do you think you can do better? Then design your own evaluation criteria for websites. Please include references to all the criteria you borrowed from, as well as a discussion of why you chose those criteria, why you chose to keep what you kept, why you chose to discard what you discarded, and why you added what you did.
Read the following articles about reading and writing on the web.
Create a personal website. This site can be about you or about something you are interested in - say a favorite band, actor, or video game. Alternatively, you may create an organizational website for a company either that you own, or for an organization that you would like to create. Satire is perfectly acceptable. In your website, create at least 5 pages of HTML. These pages should be organized with internal navigation links between the pages. Also, it should be clear on the home page what the website's purpose is (i.e., band tribute page, personal home page, company website, etc.).
This assignment has the following requirements:
You must hand code the entire assignment! That means you have to type the whole thing yourself. You may only copy and paste your own code. The one exception to this rule is code for something very complex such as a float-based three-column layout. If you do copy anybody else's code, you must CITE the person you copy and you must provide a link both to their website, and to the page which you copied the code from. You may do this in comments within the page (<!-- comment here -->), or in the footer of the page. If you have any question about whether something you want to accomplish is too complex, and thus whether it is permissible to copy somebody else's code, email me and ask before you have turned in the assignment!
Have fun with this assignment. Make a page about something you enjoy, something you find silly, etc. Make something that you would be proud to show your friends.
This assignment is a solo assignment. If you and a friend want to create a website together, then it has to contain at least 10 pages, and you will each have to pick five, and follow the above criteria. In the past, unfortunately, there have been students who have taken this course and somehow not learned how to write HTML, so I cannot allow groups of students to work together on this assignment.
Upload it to a class webspace, either Netfiles, the GSLIS I: Drive, or your personal space. Post a link to your assignment on the Personal Website Assignment forum.
For the final project, you are expected either individually or within a group to prototype a web technology by utilizing the knowledge and skills you have developed by taking this course. This web technology could be a web page, a wiki, a blog, or, more likely, some combination of many of these technologies. The purpose of the prototype is to satisfy some need.
Inspiration for the final project can come from many different sources. It might be a web technology you would find very useful to help you in your job, or to help you with your classwork; it could be a web technology that would satisfy some personal interest or help with a hobby; it could be something which would satisfy the needs of a friend or relative; or, it could be one of the project ideas which I have presented as an example below (or a variation thereof).
Ideas for final projects include:
Your final project will consist of four deliverables:
Final projects may be completed either individually or as a group. It is likely to be easier to complete the project as a group project, rather than individually. There is no limit to group size, however, for any group above three people I expect a breakdown of who performed what tasks to be included as an appendix (that does not count toward the word count) in the final written report.
In order to complete the final project, you will have to complete several stages of work:
For the prototype, it is not so important what you hand code yourself, and what you copy and paste from other people. It is more important how you create the final prototype, and how you get everything to fit together. Therefore, don't worry about copying and pasting code. Just provide a citation and a link whenever you do, either within comments, or at the bottom of the page in the footer. The Project Proposal and the Written Report I expect you to hand code (they're pretty simple and straightforward pages to create).
Upload it to a class webspace, either Netfiles, the GSLIS I: Drive, or your personal space. Post a link to your assignment on the Final Projects forum.
Perform a user evaluation or user study where you test your prototype out on real users. Write up the results of your experience, what you learned, and how you would change your prototype in the next version.
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