My First Blended Course: Part 4

Having decided to create a Blended Course about Web Design at ANU, my third task was to add some less techncial material on Analysis and Essay Writing, Ethics and Copyright. To do this I created an extra topic after "The Web Environment" for "The Social Environment". Also I added an item on Mobile devices, Writing for the Web and Testing Web Pages:

1. The Web Environment
   • Chapter 1. Web Standards
   • Chapter 2. Designing for a Variety of Browsers
   • Chapter 3. Designing for a Variety of Displays
   • Chapter 5. Accessibility
   • Mobile devices
     
   • Chapter 6. Internationalization
2. The Social Environment
   
   • Lecture 9 - Topic Analysis and Essay Writing
   • Writing for the Web
     
   • Lecture 10 - Ethics and the IT Professional
   • Lecture 30 - Copyright.
   • Testing web pages
     
3. The Structural Layer: XML and (X)HTML
   • Chapter 8. HTML and XHTML Overview
   • Chapter 9. Document Structure
   • Chapter 10. Text Elements
   • Chapter 11. Creating Links
   • Chapter 12. Images and Objects
   • Chapter 13. Tables
   • Chapter 14. Frames
   • Chapter 15. Forms
4. Web Graphics and Media
   
   • Chapter 28. Web Graphics Overview
   • Chapter 29. GIF Format
   • Chapter 30. JPEG Format
   • Chapter 31. PNG Format
   • Chapter 33. Audio on the Web
   • Chapter 34. Video on the Web
5. The Presentation Layer: Cascading Style Sheets
   • Chapter 16. Cascading Style Sheets Fundamentals
   • Chapter 17. Selectors
   • Chapter 18. Font and Text Properties
   • Chapter 20. Color and Backgrounds
   • Chapter 21. Floating and Positioning
   • Chapter 22. CSS for Tables
   • Chapter 23. Lists and Generated Content
   • Chapter 24. CSS Techniques
   • Chapter 25. Managing Browser Bugs: Workarounds, Hacks, and Filters
   • Chapter 36. Printing from the Web
6. The Behavioral Layer: JavaScript
   
   • Chapter 26. Introduction to JavaScript
   • Section 26.1. A Little Background
   • Section 26.2. Using JavaScript
   • Section 26.3. JavaScript Syntax
   • Section 26.4. Event Handling
   • Section 26.5. The Browser Object

Each topic would be covered in a week. This approach has the advantage of first introducing the student to the why of the web, then the basic mark-up, then prettying up the web pages with graphics, styles and JavaScript. Ideally web pages should be designed so that these layers can be discarded in the reverse order. That is web pages should work without JavaScript, CSS and Images, at which point they are just text.

In practice for a course also covering networking for the web, it may be necessary to interleave the web and networking topics. However, I will proceed on the assumption they are two separate modules.