material course (works,lectures and code demos)released under CC. : )

Instructional Design is a field of study that's directly related to cognitive and behavioral sciences. Its main objective is to maximize the experience of teaching and learning on special environments. This course is focused on VLE (Virtual Learning Environments). Many of the VLEs we have today are just file storage systems or discussion boards. Our mission then is to build interfaces, based on Ergonomics and Aesthetics concepts, that are easy to use, visually attractive and that motivate the users (not only students, but teachers as well) to participate on an active manner, not a passive one.

The course starts with an introduction to Infodesign, Human-centered design and Gestalt and Cognitive principles, so that every solution proposed can be coherently reasoned.

Before effectively proposing solutions to different learning scenarios, some "Personas-based" exercises will be done, so that the Designer can put him/herself into the role of the user.

After knowing the target audience, group exercises will happen around some specific questions: how can Instructional Design make the level of interaction among students, teachers and classmates to resemble the one they have when on conventional teaching methodologies? How can the basic principles of Gestalt and Cognitive sciences build the easiest path to things? How to work with open web standards and accessibility? How to explore multimedia content?

The course ends with rough concepts made into mock-up or prototypes, that are thoroughly analyzed via multi design thinking tools.

The student that attends this course will be able to develop user experience designs to be applied to various systems.

* (Jan 26 2011)
Hi guys,

Thanks for signing up. :)

I wasn't entirely familiar with p2pU system so I admit that all the process wasn't too smooth. A lot of waiting and no email reply from me.. 

So as for the course, everybody that sees their name in the course home are enrolled. Congratulations!

A lot of people sent me interesting applications so it's a shame that everyone is not in. But all the coursework will be freely available online so please feel free to come by. (For those of you whose status say pending or not accepted are not officially part of the course due to the small class size. I am really sorry about that)

There were a few considerations I took in to decide course members.

1. It's first time for me to organize a coursework so I wanted to keep the size small enough for me to be able to deal with. 

2. There might be a few advanced people in the course I believe but most people who are enrolled are more or less beginner level in wordpress so that they can take something out of this experience.

3. A lot of people showed interests for e commerce sites. But I felt that e commerce site development should be an independent subject. This course will cover more general topics regarding wordpress. Hopefully, we can organize something for that specific subject in the future.

I will send a separate email to course members for the week1 schedule.

Once again, Thanks a lot, everyone!

- t

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Wordpress is a useful platform for people without much programming knowledge to build a decent website. By utlizing freely/inexpensively available reseources (themes, plugins) and customizing its designs and functions, we can expand what our website can offer.  
We're going to start from how to install wordpress on the server, how to customize themes and styles to suit our own needs, to how to well maintain the site.  

Online maps are a rapidly growing technology.  The unique connection of maps to real world information has given open and crowdsourced maps some advantages over even the best-funded companies.

A Map Making and Programming Class

Course participants will add part of their community to the global OpenStreetMap, learn the basics of creating interactive online maps with OpenLayers, then research and design their final application.

Topics

* OpenStreetMap.org, a free and open "Wikipedia of maps," has time and time again proven the usefulness of open data.  In early 2010, responders to the Haiti earthquake turned to OpenStreetMap for the most detailed and up-to-date maps.

* OpenLayers.org, a free and open source JavaScript library, will be used to explore the basics of adding maps to web pages.  This experience gives you the know-how to use map APIs from Google, ESRI, Microsoft, or CloudMade (these alternatives will be part of a group discussion)

* Applications of maps, including open source solutions for business, disaster response, open government, and the environment, will be discussed.   Participants choose a research topic.

* A final 'interest project', chosen by the participant, will be a web map which displays real-world data and produces an informative, interactive, artistic, and/or persuasive online experience.

jQuery is a cross-browser JavaScript library that simplifies client-side scripting of HTML (HyperText Markup Language) pages using CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) based selectors to select, style and manipulate page elements. jQuery additionally offers superb support for DOM traversal, event handling, visual effects, animation, AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) and much more. With a vibrant community for support, jQuery also has an enormous plugin repository for added functionality and a fantastic user interface library of widgets which can be simply inserted into your web page and easily configured.

This course will use Rebecca Murphey's open source ebook "jQuery Fundamentals" [1] and Ben Nadel's video series entitled "An Intensive Exploration of jQuery" [2] as our primary learning resources. For examples, demos and assignments we will use collaborative tools such as jsfiddle [3] and FireFox browser add-ons such as FireBug [4] and FireBug extensions [5]. Rather than extensively covering every aspect of the jQuery API and plugins, the course will have a emphasis on learning jQuery in a participatory environment using jQuery community resources and free tools such as jsfiddle and FireBug. Although the majority of the course communications will take place through group email, we will attempt to use a conferencing tool such as TalkShoe [6] (participate via dial in or client software) to hold a few live conferences. 

[1] jQuery Fundamentals by Rebecca Murphey
http://jqfundamentals.com/book/book.html

[2] An Intensive Exploration Of jQuery by Ben Nadel
http://www.bennadel.com/resources/presentations/jquery/video/index.htm

[3] jsFiddle by Piotr Zalewa
http://jsfiddle.net/

[4] FireBug by Joe Hewitt et al
http://getfirebug.com/

[5] Firebug Extensions
http://getfirebug.com/wiki/index.php/Firebug_Extensions

[6] TalkShoe
http://www.talkshoe.com/talkshoe/

O design instrucional é um campo de estudo que está diretamente relacionado às ciências cognitivas e comportamentais. O principal objetivo é maximizar a experiência de ensino-aprendizagem em ambientes especiais. Este curso tem foco em AVAs (ambientes virtuais de aprendizagem). Muitos dos AVAs que temos hoje são apenas sistemas de armazenamento de arquivos ou listas de discussão. Nossa missão então é desenvolver interfaces, baseadas em conceitos de Ergonomia e Estética, que são fáceis de usar, visualmente atrativas e que motivam os usuários (não apenas estudantes, mas professores também) a participar de uma maneira ativa, e não passiva.

O curso inicia com uma introdução do Infodesign, Design focado no ser humano e Princípios de Gestalt e Cognitivismo, para que cada solução proposta possa ter bases comprovadas.

Antes de efetivamente propor soluções para diferentes cenários de aprendizagem, alguns exercícios baseados em Personas serão feitos, para que o designer possa se colocar no lugar do usuário.

Depois de conhecer o público-alvo, exercícios em grupo acontecerão ao redor de algumas questões específicas: como o design instrucional pode fazer com que a interação entre alunos, professores e colegas lembre aquela que eles tem em metodologias convencionais? Como os princípios básicos da Gestalt e ciências cognitivas podem formar caminhos mais fáceis? Como trabalhar com padrões abertos de internet e acessibilidade? Como explorar conteúdo multimídia?

O curso termina com conceitos livres transformados em mock-ups ou protótipos, que são analizados rigorosamente por ferramentas de design thinking.

O estudante que frequentar este curso poderá desenvolver ambientes de experiência de usuário a serem aplicados a vários sistemas.

We'll review the basics of Web accessibility as they relate to users who are blind and have low vision. We'll test drive screen readers to see what they do well and what really trips them up.

Then we'll dive into creating meaningful image descriptions for people who are blind, including complex images like charts, graphs, tables and illustrations. We'll discuss what makes good alt text, when to leave @alt empty, and when to go way beyond @alt with @longdesc and other methods. There will be lots of opportunity to write and review image descriptions.

We will discuss how people who are blind and visually impaired gather information about the visual world and how this understanding can help you create image description appropriate for the intended audience, whether it's young children, high-school students or marine biologists.

In addition, we'll talk about the ways in which good description practices can do more than satisfy an accessibility-compliance checkbox.  We'll also review lots of free resources available through NCAM, WebAIM and other organizations that will be of help after the course is over.

Finally, we will discuss the future of universal design and image description in light of changes coming to DAISY, ePub and HTML 5, as well as the work of the DIAGRAM Center, which is dedicated to rapidly increasing the availability of high-quality image descriptions through improvements to authoring tools and digital readers.

You will become aware of the top ten barriers in websites and how to recognize and avoid them. You will learn that accessibility reaches beyond blind people as there are many aspects of disabilities and perspectives to keep in mind. Checklists and add-ons help, but you will also get some first-hand insights in using (open source) screen reader software, and above all, to care about the people. Because beyond checklists you're touching their lives.

I'm planning to hold a weekly one hour telephone conference & chat via Skype for initial short presentations and discussion. We can exchange ideas and discuss assignments on the Wiki.