Multimedia Production Summer
Anselm Spoerri, Ph.D.
SCI, Rutgers University
aspoerri@rutgers.edu
Course
Description
Grading
Policy
This course will focus on the design of educational multimedia for
libraries and media centers. The objectives of the course include
 To facilitate an understanding of how to create and design usercentered, instructional multimedia
 To provide hands-on experience in multimedia production,
including digitization of images, sounds, animation and video, and
hypertext authoring
Exercises - 50%
 There will be three exercises that are designed to help you
create components that you use in your Term Project.
 You will be able to resubmit an exercise to address the feedback
provided to improve your score (provided you submitted the
exercise on time and made a valiant effort).
 Due Dates are indicated in the Schedule web page:
http://comminfo.rutgers.edu/~aspoerri/Teaching/MPOnlineSummer/Schedule.htm
and are due by Midnight of the day the exercise is due; you
need to submit the URL of where you have stored the exercise
via the Exercise specific dropbox – late exercises will not be
accepted.
 Please keep in mind that you can resubmit the exercise, so it
does not have to be perfect, but at same time you do not want to
hand in poor or shoddy work. In short, give it your “best shot”
and know that you will have the opportunity to learn from the
feedback provided and improve your score if you did not initially
receive a full score of 100. You can resubmit as soon as you have
received my feedback (and you don’t need to wait until the
Resubmit Deadline, but you need to have done so by the
deadline). The URL for revised exercise is submitted via the
same dropbox initially used.
 The URLs of your exercises will be made available to the whole
class so that you can see everybody’s work and learn from it.
Term Project - 50%
 Create a website that communicates your vision of "Why be a
Librarian in the 21st Century?"
 Build a cool site you can use as your calling card in your job
search.
 Demonstrate your technology and media savvy - use text,
images, animations effectively.
 Demonstrate your understanding of lecture materials and class
discussions.
 The site needs to include at least 10 - 12 separate pages that
are designed for easy visual scanning. If you have 4-5 main
themes and 2-3 pages per theme, then you will satisfy this
requirement.

Grading
Scale
Evaluation criteria
1. Mechanics (50%) - technical competency in web and
multimedia design: navigation, layout, animations, access
performance.
2. Meaning (30%) - concise presentation of content and effective
use of multimedia.
3. Creativity (20%)
(Keep in mind these three criteria are interrelated).
95
90
85
80
75
–
–
–
–
–
100
95
90
85
80
A
B+
B
C+
C
Please note this is a different grading scale than the standard one
since you are able to resubmit your exercises.
Textbooks
The required textbook is "Castro: HTML, XHTML & CSS: Visual
QuickStart Guide" which is the same book required in (some of the
sections of) the 550 Information Technologies course and is a good
CSS resource. You will be required to use Adobe Creative Suite 6:
Web Standard or Premium Edition (which includes Dreamweaver,
Flash Professional, Fireworks etc). You can buy the Educational
Version of CS6 from the Adobe site or rent the Creative Suite tools
via the Adobe Creative Cloud service (for info, please see
http://comminfo.rutgers.edu/~aspoerri/Teaching/MPOnlineSummer/Requirements.htm ).
Adobe CS4 is fine to use if you already own it, but if you are about to
purchase the software, make sure to purchase CS6 or rent the Cloud
Service. Adobe CS3 is okay to use if you already own it, however the
CS4+ interface is different and certain CS3 features are not
supported anymore.
You do not need to buy the software and you can use
SoftwareAnywhere@SC&I (previously called Citrix@Rutgers) to
access the CS6 Adobe software for free – detailed instructions
provided on the Requirements page on the course website. Students
have been using the SoftwareAnywhere@SC&I web service in the
past semesters: some had a great experience and others not ... it can
depend on the speed of your network connection (needs to be fast
and best to be plugged into your internet box) and/or "unknown"
factors... the only way to find out is to try it.
You will need a SC&I network account to use SoftwareAnywhere
@SC&I web service.
To activate or reactivate your SC&I Network account, please
visit: http://account.comminfo.rutgers.edu and login with your NetID.
To login to SoftwareAnywhere@SC&I web service:
http://sa.comminfo.rutgers.edu
You can make use of free 30 Day trial of Adobe Creative Cloud
service: if you sign up for it in Week 4 on June 20 or later, then you
should be able to use the free version until the end of the summer
course. We start using Flash in Week 5 and you can use the free trial.
As indicated, accessing the CS6 Adobe applications via
SoftwareAnywhere@SC&I may not be a “smooth and easy
experience” for all of you and so you will have to test it on your own
to see if this is a viable solution for you ... you may decide to buy the
CS6 education edition or subscribe to Creative Cloud Service because
you want to use in the future ... you don't have to decide now and
you can wait until Week 2.
Adobe offers the Adobe Creative Cloud service http://www.adobe.com/products/creativecloud.html - that lets you
access all the Creative Suite software tools for $30 / month
(educational price and 1 year contract … sometimes there are $20
/month deals available). This would be an economical solution if the
SoftwareAnywhere @SC&I service is not a smooth experience for
you. Since there are no required textbooks for the course, investing
in the Adobe Cloud service (in combination to making use of the 30
day free trial) could be a good and advisable course of action.
SC&I is subscribing to a service called LyndaCampus that is a
school-wide version of lynda.com, an online training library of over
80,000 video based training movies on over 1400 software titles.
LyndaCampus is available for free for students registered in SC&I
courses and can be used to learn software (Adobe CS6, such as
Dreamweaver, Fireworks, Flash ... all programs we will be using in
this course), programming skills, video techniques, etc.
The lectures for this course have been redesigned to make extensive
use of the LyndaCampus content to complement and enhance the
lectures and video demos I have created. You must be logged into
LyndaCampus - https://lynda.comminfo.rutgers.edu/Login - to be
able to access the lynda.com videos included at the top of the
Lectures page of this course.
The Help section of the different Adobe software applications is a
useful resource. I venture to guess that most of us may not like
consulting the Help section of a software application, but I encourage
you to do so anyway.
The goal of this course is to teach you useful software skills so that
you are able to create media rich Term Project.
This course lectures will teach strategic skills so that you will be
able to create a project that you can be proud of, but this course will
not be able to do full justice to all the great features included in the
Adobe software applications.
I hope you complement the course lectures by consulting the Help
section as well as books find useful. I have also included links to
useful resources, such as tutorials and videos, to complement the
materials presented in the weekly lectures.
Email
Policy
I will make an effort to respond to your emails within 48 hours –
often it may be faster and sometimes slower. As we are approaching
the due date for the Term Project, you can expect that I will answer
your emails within hours in the week before the project is due.
Threaded
Discussion
Policy
Virtual
Office
Hours
I will suggest a topic to be discussed in a threaded discussion and I
expect you all to participate at least once in every discussion
that is assigned to the different weeks. A discussion will become
active on the Wednesday of the week it is assigned to and it will
close Sunday at Midnight of that same week. Thus, you will have
three days to make your contribution to the discussion.
Threaded Discussion is meant to serve as community resource for
all of you, where you can ask for technical or content help from your
fellow students and myself.
Adobe Connect: a weekly virtual office hour will be held on a
Saturday 9am (since this summer, I will only be available in the
mornings to chat and most likely Saturday 9am will work for the
largest number of students). We will use the free Adobe Connect
service because it supports voice conferencing (good to have a
headset with a built-in mic) and screen & application sharing (this
way you can see me perform specific steps on your screen in realtime and vice versa). The Adobe Connect attendance is voluntary, but
highly recommended.
Skype / Adobe Connect: I will make myself available to talk to you
via Skype / Adobe Connect by appointment only if a question cannot
be answered or technical problem cannot be solved via email or chat.
In the week before the Term project is due, I will post hours when I
can be reached by Skype and you can call me during those time
periods or we can schedule a phone appointment.
Skype Widget: the Lectures and Exercises pages of the course
website have an embedded Skype widget which tells if I am available
to talk via Skype.