ITEC 745: Instructional Web Authoring 1
Spring 2010

Class Description

Instructional Web Authoring I is designed for students who are interested in exploring the instructional uses of the World Wide Web. In particular, you will create a short web-based e-learning course to teach a topic of your choosing. Along the way, you will learn some real-world strategies for managing the complexity of an e-learning course, and you'll explore some instructional design principles that are especially relevant to the creation of mediated learning.

Regardless of your intended application, the underlying technology of the web is the same. So what you learn in this class by creating a short e-learning course will also be directly applicable to many other web projects you may find useful in your classroom, company, or personal life.

This class will give you a solid grounding in web authoring fundamentals, focusing on three key areas:

1. Fluency with XHTML and CSS, the two primary technical components you have to master in order to write standards-based web pages
2. Use of Adobe Dreamweaver, the industry standard tool for writing web pages
3. The application of instructional design principles craft effective web sites that support the needs of learners, instructors, and instructional designers

Further details are available in the:

• Class syllabus

Contact Information

Replace "at" with @ in the email address below to send me mail.

• Instructor email for Ray Cole: rayc "at" sfsu.edu
• TA email for Gary Rosenstein: gmr "at" sfsu.edu

Class Slides

• Week 1: Thursday, January 28, 2010—Intro to course, examples of instructional uses of the web, history, web components, web browser functions, web browser tricks
  
  
• Week 2: Thursday, February 4, 2010—Anatomy of a web page, structure vs. layout, tags and attributes, minimum required elements, headings, paragraphs, images, entities, keeping your code tidy

  Supplementary Material:

  • Assignment 1: Biography—rubric

• Week 3: Thursday, February 11, 2010—In-class review of student biography pages, how to read a URL, schemes, ports, hostnames, absolute vs. relative URLs, legal URL characters, anchor tags, Ted Nelson's definition of "hypertext", implementing an interactive interview

  Supplementary Material:

  • Assignment 2a: Interactive Interview—rubric

• Week 4: Thursday, February 18, 2010—Unordered (bulleted) lists, ordered (numbered) lists, definition lists, HTML comments, intro to Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), background-color, font-size, font-family, color, how to read a hexidecimal (base-16) color definition, font-size units, generic font-families, using the <link> tag to connect your css file with your web pages

  Week 4 Reading Assignment:

  • For next week, read lessons 1, 2, 3, and 4 of HTML.NET’s free CSS tutorial at http://www.html.net/tutorials/css/

  Supplementary Material:

  • Assignment 2b: Interactive Interview with CSS—rubric

• Week 5: Thursday, February 25, 2010—CSS for anchor (<a>) tags, a:link, a:visited, a:hover, a:active, HTML/XHTML tables, CSS classes, CSS pre-defined color names

  Week 5 Reading Assignment:

  • For next week, read lessons 5 and 6 of HTML.NET’s free CSS tutorial at http://www.html.net/tutorials/css/
  • Also read Web Publishing @ SFSU—SFSU's Division of Information Technology web site about how to get set up to use free space on the SFSU web server

• Week 6: Thursday, March 4, 2010—Spanning rows and columns in XHTML tables, intro to Dreamweaver: site setup, uploading files to the web server, downloading files from the web server, viewing uploaded files
  
  
• Week 7: Thursday, March 11, 2010—XHTML validation, graphic hyperlinks, nested tables
  
  
• Week 8: Thursday, March 18, 2010—Architecture of the web (computer with the web server vs. the computer with the web browser), text-explore page-type
  
  
• Week 9: Thursday, March 25, 2010—Midterm exam review, Multiple choice page-type, graphic hyperlinks, CSS box model

  Supplementary Material:

  • An XHTML table tutorial—This one's a bit technical in places. However, it has a section on using tables for laying out your page, and one on controling your table's look with CSS. You may find it helpful.
    
    
• Week 10: Thursday, April 1, 2010 2010—SPRING BREAK: NO CLASS

• Week 11: Thursday, April 8, 2010—Class writing style guidelines, Dreamweaver file folders and folder maintenance, folders, subfolders, and URLs.

  Week 11 Supplementary Materials:

  • Final Project Guidelines
  • ID Style and Writing Checklist—Use this checklist to help you make sure that your final project is adhering to the appropriate class style guidelines. For details on specific style guidelines, see below.
  • Bulleted List Styles Guidelines
  • Guidelines for Describing Screen Elements
  • Use Second Person Point of View
  • Avoid Passive Voice
  • Read for next week: Karpicke, J. D., & Roediger, H. L. (2008). The critical importance of retrieval for learning. Science, 319, 966-968.

• Week 12: Thursday, April 15, 2010—Recent research on the effects of assessment on learning.
  
  

  Week 12 Supplementary Materials:

  • Performance Learning Filter: Are Your Learning Designs Increasing Organizational Performance?--An archive of a free webinar presented by Scott Colehour, Solutions Architect and Co-Founder of Allen Interactions. The webinar took place online at 11:00 AM Thursday, April 23rd, 2009. Check out the excellent demonstration of two different e-learning designs, both based on the exact same learning objectives. The first is like most e-learning that I see (boring and not terribly effective). The second shows how much more can be done when the instructional designer stops thinking his or her task is to present content, and starts thinking about how to get the learner to demonstrate the desired skills in an appropriate context.
  • The Primary Components of Interactive Learning Experiences: Context, Challenge, Activity, and Feedback—Free archive of a webinar by Michael Allen given Thursday, April 17, 2008 at 10:00 AM. Contains a wonderful demo of an e-learning course that leads with a challenge and has more in common with a video game than with traditional (he might say "boring") e-learning
  • Michael Allen's Guide to E-Learning—My short review: The three books on e-learning that Michael Allen has written so far have been, by far, the most practical and interesting such books I have ever read. This one and his latest one (Designing Successful E-Learning) are particularly outstanding. These books will likely change your view about what good e-learning should strive to do and how it should go about accomplishing its goals. Allen's principles, like "Put the learner at risk" or "Don't start at the beginning" or "Test before telling" run counter to much ingrained practice in the industry. But radical though they are, the principles he lays out are, I think, exactly what is needed to shake e-learning out of its doledrums and take it to the next level where it can actually be of genuine value to the learner. Read these books and you'll never want to design e-learning the "old" way ever again.
  • A New View of E-Learning Design: Stages of Change—A free, archived Webinar by Michael Allen.
  • Simulations and the Future of Learning—An interesting talk by Clark Aldrich, author of Learning by Doing and Simulations and the Future of Learning
    
    
• Week 13: Thursday, April 22, 2010—Workshop Day 1. Work on your final project in class, your classmates and I will be there to help you.
  
  
• Week 14: Thursday, April 29, 2010—Workshop Day 2. Work on your final project in class, your classmates and I will be there to help you.
  
  
• Week 15: Thursday, May 6, 2010—First half of class final project presentations.
  
  
• Week 16: Thursday, May 13, 2010—Second half of class presentations
  
  
• Week 17: Thursday, May 20, 2010—Final Exam day, but no final in this class. No class today.