William M. Pegram
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Revised: January 26, 2022

Northern Virginia Community College

The schedule page contains the week-by-week material; the schedule page will be continually updated during the semester.

ITE 270 - 001L, Advanced Multimedia Development, Spring 2022 - TTh11:10am-12:30pm via Zoom - no meetings in a classroom

Web Site for Class: www.billpegram.com

Course Content

Web content management systems (CMS) are the focus of this course, in particular WordPress and Drupal. Although the prerequisite listed for this course is ITE 170, ITD 110 provides as good, or better, preparation for this course. ITE 270 was first taught at NVCC in summer 2021 (by Zoom, by Judy Miller). I attended all sessions of that course and taught small portions of it. Spring 2022 is the first time I have taught this course.

There will be no instruction or use of animation, image or video editing software such as Animate, Photoshop, or Premiere Pro. If you want additional study of these, you might consider ART 130 and 230, courses offered by NVCC Workforce Development (https://www.nvcc.edu/workforce/), or possibly ITE 270 at another VCCS school.

Transfer

For questions about how IT courses transfer, visit www.transfervirginia.org or email iet@nvcc.edu

Grading

20% midterm, 25% final, 25% project, 30% exercises.

Software

All software for this course will be free to students. In the first part of the course, we will be installing WordPress on our computers in a couple ways so you will need the privileges to do the install -- this should not be a problem unless you are using a computer provided by your employer. Later we will be be hosting our WordPress and Drupal sites on Pantheon and perhaps another web host.

Hardware/OS Requirements

NVCC established minimum computer requirements for students in May 2020 - https://www.nvcc.edu/admissions/_files/Student-Computer-Specifications.pdf.

Textbooks

Required: WordPress the missing manual, Third Edition by Matthew MacDonald, O'Reilly, 2020, ISBN 978-1-492-07416-8; https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/wordpress-the-missing/9781492074151/ provides a free trial for the book (10 days, I believe). We will do at least 300 pages in this book. For an introduction to web content systems, we will use Chapters 1-4 of Web Content Management by Deane Barker. This is available online through the NVCC library by searching for Web Content Management Barker. For Drupal, we will use the Drupal User Guide at https://www.drupal.org/docs/user_guide/en/index.html.

Office Hours

Office hours will be held on Zoom on Fridays and immediately after class on Thursdays. Email me in advance if you wish to meet on Friday.

Communication with Students

For general class announcements and messages to individual students, I will use Canvas so make sure Canvas is set up so you see these promptly. Similarly, I suggest using Canvas to send me a message. If you email me at wpegram@nvcc.edu, please remember to include your name and class; this is not necessary when using Canvas since Canvas supplies this information.

Academic Integrity

On homework assignments and projects, students may ask for and receive some assistance from others, unless otherwise directed by the instructor.  Yet those helping a student should avoid "doing the work" for the student.

Unless specifically stated in the assignment, students may work together to complete an assignment. However my experience is that students who turn in essentially identical work on an assignment tend not to do well on subsequent tests either because they have not learned the material or are too reliant on another person. 

No assistance is permitted on exams and quizzes and you must have your webcam on during these times so that I may monitor you. The college policy on student conduct is found at www.nvcc.edu/students/handbook/conduct.html. You will be asked to submit your student ID or equivalent ID in Canvas to take exams.

Cheating on a test will result in a grade of 0 on the test. Cheating on a subsequent test will result in a grade of F for the course. Cheating may be reported to the Division Dean and the Annandale Judicial Affairs Officer.

Dropping and Withdrawal from the Class:

Thursday, February 3 is the last day to drop a 15 week class and get a tuition refund (use NovaConnect) or to switch to audit (which requires my signature).   Saturday, March 26 is the last day to withdraw without grade penalty in a 15 week course. The award of W after the last day to withdraw REQUIRES official documentation and the Dean's signature which is very difficult to get..

Covid-19

Although all sessions of this class will be via Zoom, you should be aware of the following.

See https://www.nvcc.edu/safe-campus/index.html

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