Since this course is meant to explore the use of websites and online tools, it's fitting that we'll be diving into a plethora of different applications and services to accomplish out goals. It might seem overwhelming at first, but I really think that having these different platforms available will foster productivity and community.

Penn State Resources

Canvas: Penns State’s overarching hub for courses. Check here for grades and personal feedback from the instructor. Some assignments will be submitted here as well.

Course Website: A multi-page website that can accommodate a greater variety of content, including videos and galleries of student work (in the Open Studio section of the site). Each week will span one Lesson on the course website. You can always navigate to the site from Canvas, but I just bookmark it for easy access.

Lynda: Some of the videos posted on the Course Website will be from Lynda, which is a terrific service that provides very extensive tutorial videos for all sorts of media production software. You normally have to pay for access to the videos and example files, but you can access this content with your PSU login credentials.

PSU Sites: Penn State offers free hosting for multiple Wordpress sites. Wordpress is a popular tool for making websites, but the URLs for your sites will be something like "http://sites.psu.edu/YourSiteName" — we'll use this for making individual research blogs.

Submitting Work

Due to the variety of projects and filetypes involved in web design, we will submit work in a few different ways:

Open Studio: class-wide galleries of images for each assignment. Students will leave comments here during peer reviews for exercises, assignments, and blog posts.

Canvas: submissions to the instructor will receive private feedback and grades.