As a Bacca Fellow, I offered an undergraduate course “Web Design and Narrative” in 2016–2017. The course was based at the Center for Documentary Studies (CDS) at Duke University and drew a fairly broad cross-section of students, the majority of whom were either majoring in Computer Science or Visual Media Studies. Some students came into the course with a clear idea of what the content focus would be of their semester-long website projects, where others did not yet have a project focus in mind.
As I saw the course ahead of me, the primary challenge was two-fold: (1) the technical background of the students varied widely, as this course was not part of a sequence of courses with pre-requisites; (2) I wanted to have the course be fairly expansive in terms of having students think about effective and thoughtful design and communication, and not just to focus on coding and the purely technical aspects of web design. Along with the LAMP-inspired approaches below, I often met with students individually to assess their progress, answer their questions, and to best help each student technically at whatever level they were at. I built in some time during class for these meetings; those who also came to office hours outside of class were able to receive more attention and generally had more fully realized and successful websites by the end of the semester.
We met weekly for 2.5 hours in a computer lab at CDS. Most students had their own computers and the software that all but one student used was open-source and available for free.
To give some context for the approaches below, I’ll add here what a few of the representative website projects were:
In the third week of class, students were required to run a seven minute “pitch session” directed at the class as well as myself and a graduate teaching assistant. Students spent four minutes each presenting their ideas for their website, and then ran a brief question-and-answer period of three minutes to get some quick feedback about their ideas. Students in the cohort were surprisingly responsive and had a fair amount of feedback to offer to one another. I was largely silent during these sessions, but took notes and then sent feedback to the students by e-mail; I also then met with them individually the following week, typically asking them, as needed, to either reduce the scope of an overly ambitious project given our timeframe, or to provide more detail for projects that were still somewhat vague.
The students in this session had to construct an oral presentation which had elements of an “elevator” speech, combined usually with a mock-up of a homepage displayed on an overhead screen. They received feedback from me about how well they worked within the time frame given – ideally going neither too long or too short – and how naturally and fluidly their presentation was in terms of evidence of being well-prepared, working off of a memorized/well-practiced presentation, and their ability to direct and re-direct the conversation period after their initial pitch in order to maximize the amount of helpful feedback they received.
Three-quarters of the way through the semester I devoted a class session to a series of “portfolio reviews,” in which each student met individually with at least three people from outside the class, chiefly web designers as well as other faculty/staff at CDS who had experience in communication and marketing. Students were coached on how to make effective use of the 20 minutes they had with each reviewer, from making introductions, demonstrating their website, and receiving feedback; different reviewers could sometimes give conflicting advice to the students, and the students needed to weigh and judge the validity of the comments and questions they received.
While the students had up until this point been largely focused on their own self-evaluation of their sites, guided by my comments and feedback, this was a space in which they were confronted directly with live feedback in real time from people sitting directly across a table from them. This was challenging for some students, as it can be difficult for some to hear critique directly, particularly around work that they closely identify with on a personal basis.
While it was a logistical challenge to arrange for 15 reviewers, who each met with three students, in future years I would consider expanding the reviews even more, or perhaps holding them twice a semester. Students largely reported that they were useful, though some students who weren’t as far along received less feedback; in other cases, a few students felt a particular reviewer was not helpful or insightful. Overall, this exercise was a good test case for the students as they thought about public engagement with their work with audiences outside of the classroom.
Based on my experience with this course this year, I will consider making the course permission-only in future semesters. It fills quickly and had a long waiting list, but not all students had a compelling focus for their project. Those who had already created content – through another course, or through amassing a body of work over their time at Duke – were able to realize stronger websites.
I will in future semesters consider eliminating some of the earlier assignments that are a dry run for the final project site and instead have students begin their projects even earlier. If I then build in more grade-based deadlines and accountability, that would push students to identify and overcome obstacles earlier (e.g. by gathering content and avoiding technical snafus), thus allowing for more thorough and robust critiques at the end of the semester. A number of students added a large amount of content in the final two weeks of the semester. As a result, I felt there were aspects of the resulting sites that could have been further improved and we could have had more in-depth conversations about whether all of their editorial and creative choices aligned with their project goals. While I could offer this feedback as part of my final review of the projects, it would be ideal to have these issues addressed before the semester closed out.
IMAGE CREDIT: Photo by Ilya Pavlov on Unsplash.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Christopher Sims is the Undergraduate Educator Director at the Center for Documentary Studies and a Lecturing Fellow in Documentary Arts at Duke University.
