Course Syllabus

Welcome to the online syllabus of MMC 3260 / MMC 5015: Your Digital Life! This is a course about how to build and maintain your online presence, your digital identity, so to speak. Your digital identity includes everything you read, write and do online – email, social media, blogging, personal websites, shopping, archiving your professional work, and gaming. Your digital life is becoming more and more important as the internet and the web permeate every facet of our lives.

Class Meeting Time

Tuesdays and Thursdays, 12:50 to 1:40 p.m., Florida Gym 0230.

Course Objectives

This class will teach you how to build and maintain a professional and personal online presence that will help you in your career. It also will help you learn to make the best use of the tools the internet gives us for telling stories and presenting information.

By the end of this semester you will:

Establish your own online brand
Register an internet domain name (such as yourname.com) and begin populating it with your work
Create a blog with at least a dozen posts
Develop an online resume
Build a professional presence on at least two social networks
Begin an online portfolio you can use to get a job
Learn how to maximize the value of your online presence through search-engine optimization and mobile-responsive design
Build a personal website showcasing the information about yourself you want to share with the world.

This course includes significant content about building websites. You will learn introductory web design using Hypertext Markup Language (HTML5), Cascading Stylesheets (CSS3) and basic Photoshop. You will be able to create web pages by hand, but you will not be taught Flash, Javascript, CGI scripting or the like, although you are free to experiment with them.

Course Difficulty

If you've talked to other students from previous semesters about this course, then you've probably already heard that this course is a lot of work. This is true: this is not an "easy" class. While the concepts of good website design seem straight forward, applying those concepts correctly and professionally is not. You will spend many hours on this course. This course will likely take more time than you anticipate.

This course may appear daunting, but we assume that you are entering this course with little to no web design experience. We will guide you through the process of web design, but the most successful students are those that take initiative and responsibility for their learning, and seek out knowledge and skills beyond what we can cover in class.

Website Last Updated: 12/06/2013