Welcome to R541!

This course covers the basics of technology and of media design for instruction. In this class you will work on design projects individually, and work together with your classmates in the critique sessions to discover and apply the principles of message and media design.

Volunteer Design/Technical Coaches
This term we are fortunate to have 2 volunteer Design/Technical coaches for R541. They are:

• Seung-hee Lee
• Sunnie Lee Watson

The Design/Technical coaches are advanced students (this term, all doctoral students) who have completed core classes, including R541. They will be helping with the moderation of critique sessions and giving critique input (design coaching), as well as monitoring Oncourse discussion forums for technical questions and answer or re-direct questions.

The volunteer coaches are, as their title implies, volunteering in order to gain teaching experience and, in some cases, online teaching experience. They will be interacting with you during critiques and via the discussion forums where you can post technical questions. They may or may not be able to answer messages that you send directly to them via email; if these messages require more time than they have committed to spend, they may refer you to another coach or back to me if you write to them individually. If you are writing to them about scheduling critique sessions, you can expect a response from a direct email. The contact information for Design/Technical coaches under "Class" link in Oncourse. Their email addresses are not published here to cut down on them receiving spam.

Review the Whole Website
Be sure to review the entire website. Although the syllabus contains descriptions of each project, you will find detailed project requirements under the "Projects" link at the top of this page, along with sample work, document templates and so on. As the semester progresses, you will find additional resources, as well as "just-in-time" support features and tutorials.

Requirement for Original Work
This is a design/production class. You are equally responsible for attending to technology use and to design decisions while you work on your projects. You are also required to produce original work for all aspects of each project. Any text, graphics, photography, animation elements, video or audio elements must be created entirely by you. this means you may not use clip art, existing video or audio (except 30 seconds or less of recorded music used for intro or out-tro segments on audio files), or anyone else's text, no matter how brief the excerpt, regardless of whether or not the work is copyright-free. You will be in violation of course requirements if you do not produce your own work, even if you have not violated anyone's copyright or if you have express permission to use the material. The one exception is Project 1 -- for this project you may use web images to represent the common objects you include in your form and function analysis.

Last Updated: 24.01.2007