J215 Intro to Multimedia Web Skills (2016)

Course Objective

This five-week mini-course is a follow-up to the Intro to Multimedia Reporting Bootcamp workshop, and is required for all first-year journalism graduate students in the Fall.

The objective of the class is to teach every student the foundational skills needed to create an online website, such as a personal portfolio site. This includes instruction in the basics of HTML and CSS, design principles for websites and using hosting services to publish a website.

This class meets for the first time on Tuesday, Nov. 10, and then meets again on Nov. 17, Nov. 24, Dec. 1 and Dec. 8. The class sessions are in the same Tuesday time slots as the J200 "super class" (which ends on Nov. 3).

Grading Policy

Grading will be made up of three areas:

Attendance:	33%
Recipe Assignment:	33%
Final Website Portfolio:	34%

Quizzes and class assignments will be given on bCourses.

Attendance Policy

Legitimate excused absences per California Education Code (CEC) include: Accommodation of Religious Creed, approved extracurricular activities (only will be considered if announced on the first day of class since the entire schedule is listed), accommodation for disability, pregnancy and parenting, approved CEC situations like funeral services or jury duty, and lastly due to minor illness with approved note from the UHS or other medical professional.

Students must inform the instructors about an absence, excused or not.

In any case, if a student has two absences — regardless if they are excused or not — they should setup a time to meet with the instructor when possible. While still excused, missing two classes may require the student to retaking the course until next year.

Making Up Missed Classes

As quoted by the UC Berkeley guidelines on absences:

Students are responsible for material covered during missed classes whether or not they have been formally excused; therefore it is the student’s responsibility to inform him/herself about the material missed....it is not the instructor’s or the GSI’s responsibility to tutor students in missed material. For this reason it is recommended that students absent from class for any reason make timely contact with several other students in the class to arrange for thorough briefing on the material they missed.

The tutors and instructor will make material available on this page as much as possible, and will attempt to help students when possible. However, it is the ultimate responsibility for students to make-up missed work on their own.

Nov 1

Introduction to Multimedia Storytelling — This session is about understanding the web as a medium for storytelling. What's its nature? Its characteristics? Includes a lesson on choosing the best medium for the story.

Nov 15

Introduction to HTML — This lesson will cover an introduction to HyperText Markup Language (HTML). Student will learn about the different tags in HTML and how to build a basic web page.

Nov 22

Introduction to CSS — This lesson will cover an introduction to Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and go over syntax for CSS selectors, such as IDs and classes. Students will learn about the various CSS properties to add some design to the web page from the previous class.

Nov 29

CSS for designing a web page — Lesson will cover more in-depth CSS lessons on styling a web page, understanding the box model better, certain layout rules and styling properties.

Dec 6

Using Bootstrap framework for building websites — Lesson will cover the Bootstrap framework for creating web pages, as well as understanding the grid system, various classes build into Bootstrap, and setting up a basic HTML boilerplate for constructing websites in the future.