W1 Grading Comments

Week 1 work was simple, allowing students to explore Moodle, to see how the research-discussion works and do a good research on modern technologies. The quality was good and showed that we have quite a strong group.
I will just advise those who published posts at the end of the learning week to switch to early work mode as many of you did, since starting week 2 you will have more technical tasks that might create problems requiring help or more work than you planned.

Commentary to W2 material

The goals of this week include not only the basic understanding how HTML is built and used, but also how to use simple online tutorials (like typing “HTML tutorial” Google). This is the practice that you will need to use due to the continuous changes in Web development tools and environment.

This also shows the methodology that we use in this course in all weekly tasks:

1.    You get basic understanding of how the currently learned tool works

2.    Get some simple hands-on experience to make sure that you can really use it.

3.    To see how online tutorials or search for discussion groups can allow to get the specific details that you will need when doing specific tasks without memorizing all small details. This is called JITL (just-in-time-learning) used by professionals in Web development with lots of changes coming every day. In this week’s case it is the understanding that knowledge of HTML is just the knowledge of what tag to use for a specific element that you want to put on your HTML page. Once you learn how to deal with some of them – you do not really need to remember all the tags but go to online tutorials that all have the lists of tags and examples of how to use them, find what you need and see the correct use of it. Instead of taking the semester-long course of HTML and then of each of the known technologies - we can use this methodology for learning a bunch of most important open-source tools for Web development in one class.

4.    The last part of our future weekly work within this methodology includes experience in more complicated and creative use of the elements learned in simple exercises (like a simple meaningless HTML page from this week). This course is project-oriented and starting next week (or you can start thinking even now) you will be choosing and proposing the term project topic, which is a Web site that will be using all technologies learned in this class. Once you decided on the site and it is approved – the last part of weekly tasks will be in applying to your site the technology learned-and-tried in simple hands-on tasks of that week. The site will be growing with every week when you will be adding more features and technologies to end the semester with something interesting that can demonstrate your employers (or potential ones) your ability to handle a bunch of important Web technologies and combine them in one project. This will also be a reminder of how to use specific technologies by just going to your site and seeing how you did it.

More About the Course

 Read here more about the essence of this course.

Purpose of This Blog

Since the course is hands-on, dynamic, and in online format - I will be running a blog that will substitute professor's commentary that you might get in face-to-face classes. It will allow make such comments more timely (whenever they have to be done and not only during class sessions) and more tailored to the current class performance and activities. Here you will find my current comments on the tasks, grades, additional help materials, etc.

Check this blog often since I assume that you've read it and consider it in my evaluation of your course work, task creation, and quiz questions. Additional advice, requirements, or modifications in the weekly tasks will also be posted here.