Assignments

Weekly reflection memo

You’ll need to submit a one-page (500 words) reflection by noon on Monday each week. You can do a lot of different things with this memo: discuss something you learned from the readings, write about the best or worst presentation you saw that week, connect the readings or projects from that week to your own work, etc. These memos essentially let you explore and answer some of the key questions of this course, including:

These memos are also to help me see what you glean from each week’s reading so I can prepare class discussions to be most useful and interesting to you. These memos will only be graded for completion. Instructions for submitting the memo will be in the assignment page for that week.

Projects

In order to give you practice with the design and narrative principles you’ll learn in this class, you will complete three different projects, each focused on a different overarching course theme. In general, in these projects I will give you slides, charts, handouts, or academic papers that you will need to redesign or restructure. You will not need to create your own content for these assignments, and you’ll be able to use whatever program you feel comfortable with (Microsoft Office, Adobe applications, R, Tableau, etc.).

Specific details will be posted on the page for each individual project.

Final project: Story portfolio

Each research presentation has a structure that has to change depending on the medium and audience of the presentation. For your final project, you will create a collection of stories for an academic research article I will provide you. Specifically, you will create the following:

Final presentation

At the end of the course, you will turn in all the parts of your story portfolio and give a 10-minute presentation of your research article. I will grade these final presentations according to both your rubric and my own rubric, with equal weight (i.e. your rubric score consists of 50% of the total grade). These presentations will be held during the course’s scheduled final.