There is a lot of information to digest in the first week of COM1000. Let me see if I can dispel some confusion regarding the assignments. First, don’t panic. It’s way too early in the semester to be panicking.
The assessment plan lays out how the course is assessed. Discussions, quizzes, assignments, exams, and projects are diverse ways to involve your thinking and assess how you are grasping the concepts. The assessment plan can be found in the Getting Started section.
HTML is largely about hands-on coding. Each unit in the book walks you through a project. The necessary files are provided to you as a .zip file in the Assignment instructions. The zip file for unit A is unitA.zip and can be found in the Assignment 1a link.
The in-class lecture, if you’re taking the course on-ground, is on the big picture ideas from the chapter. The chapter will introduce the necessary concepts and will walk you through a project so you get hand-holding through the creation of the code. For online classes, the book chapter is your lecture.
The end of the chapter has three main sections: A review quiz, the Skills Review section, and the independent exercises. The review quiz will prepare you for the online quizzes. They are for your benefit but are not “required”. The online quizzes are required and you have three attempts. The Skills Review section is required. You will be graded on how you complete the Skills Review section and it will be included in your .zip archive that you submit each week.
The Skills Review is good but it holds your hand the whole way. To really learn web design, you need to create some pages from scratch, thinking your way through the design and troubleshooting problems that arise. For that reason, you are also required to complete a project where you are given less guidance. The Independent Challenges at the end of the book are designed to accomplish that.
I stray from the posted assignments in that I don’t require you complete all the Independent Challenges. While I encourage you to do it as it will give you more practice, I don’t require it. Most of you are Web Design students and will benefit from creating an online resume or portfolio that will grow with you as you move through the curriculum. So I want to encourage you to create a personal portfolio as your independent project. What you are required to do each week is:
- Read and complete the unit project – White pages
- Complete the Skills Review Section at the end of the unit chapter (beige pages)
- Complete the Real Life Independent Challenge
- All three of those projects should be in the root folder (see video link below)
- Participate in online discussions
- Take weekly quiz
Week 1 is largely about learning notepad, textEdit, the discussion forum, email, how the class works, what I expect in the class and the basics of structuring an HTML document.
So what to do?
For week1:
- Introductory message in the discussion forum
- Complete the project in Unit A (this will require you to download unitA.zip)
- Complete the Skills Review section at the end of the chapter
How to set up your folders
I have created a video to illustrate how your folders should be set up and how to approach creating your folders, archiving them, and submitting them. The URL to the video is at http://dalerogers.me/2013/01/22/arranging-files-and-folder-structure/