Course structure
J560 is an asynchronous, online course. We will meet on occasion for Zoom check-ins, but otherwise you will be responsible for viewing the course content, completing the assigned readings and completing the scheduled work for each week by Sunday at 11:59PM.
The course is divided into 15 weeks, and each week will carry a theme to help you develop your skills as a visual communicator. The course will feature two pre-recorded lectures each week, and often a skills tutorial video, as well as required readings and a dataset from which to work for a weekly deliverable. The deliverable will usually take the form of an interactive graphic that you will add to your J560 website, progressively building tangible evidence of your progress.
Early in the semester, you will use HTML and CSS code to establish your J560 website, which you will publish through IU’s Pages service. (We will be providing you with a “shell” of this page as a template, and you will be changing the content and adding some basic style rules to control the site’s presentational aspects.) We will soon add pages for a series of chart visualizations, and a page for map visualizations that will demonstrate your burgeoning data viz skills.
Each deliverable will be assessed on a 10-point scale, divided into five categories:
- Clarity — degree to which the visualization makes the informative content accessible
- Relevance – the “newsworthiness” of the data you choose to visualize to the topic
- Writing – the quality of your headline, labels and explainer
- Design – presentational aspects, including color, typography and composition
- Accuracy – work must be free of errors, either in facts, grammar, spelling or numeracy
We will be using a series of online services and tools to help us produce this work. That will require you to set up a series of accounts — see below for a full list — but the only required software is Microsoft Excel for working with datasets, and a code editor to write HTML, CSS and Javascript. (We will be using Sublime Text in the tutorial videos.)
Collectively, the deliverable work determines three quarters of your grade for this course, with 60 percent of your final grade derived from the weekly submissions and 15 percent for the final website, due on the last day of the course.
The remaining 25 percent is divided evenly between responses — in the form of discussion questions — which you will compose and answer for each assigned reading, and four quizzes, which you will complete on Canvas at the end of each of our four units.
Course policies
As we are an asynchronous course, time management and budgeting is up to you as long as you meet weekly deadlines (Sundays at 11:59PM) for your deliverables (in the form of published work appearing on your website, after Week 3), reading responses and, at the end of each of our four units, an online quiz.
Deadlines are, as ever, the lifeblood of journalistic practice, but given that our out-of-class responsibilities may occasionally create issues with completing work on time, we will permit you to submit late work up to one week following the initial deadline — but carrying a 50 percent penalty.
Attendance at our periodic Zoom check-ins will factor into your grade — in a fairly small way — as part of your reponses score. If you are unable to attend a check-in, please let me know ahead of time via email, and I will consider that your check-in for the week. We will work together early in the semester to determine a check-in time that will work for everone enrolled in the course.
Academic misconduct is defined as any activity that tends to undermine the academic integrity of the institution. Violations include: cheating, fabrication, plagiarism, interference, violation of course rules and facilitating academic dishonesty. When you submit an assignment with your name on it, you are signifying that the work contained therein is yours, unless otherwise cited or referenced. Any ideas or materials taken from another source for either written or oral use must be fully acknowledged. Sanctions for academic misconduct may include a failing grade on the assignment, reduction in your final course grade, and a failing grade in the course, among other possibilities. If you are unsure about the expectations for completing an assignment or taking a test or exam, be sure to seek clarification beforehand.