Course Plan

Prevailing conditions

Time planning

The course I planned for a one-week full-time course with a preceding online phase (blended mobility) for students to get to know each other and share ideas about good or bad websites of their local entrepreneurs. Nevertheless, the course can be also used in other course setting, e.g. within lessons of marketing and entrepreneurship, because students will be able to create and administrate their own website on a basic level and offer the products they want to sell.

Technical setup

It is necessary to set up a unique authorized access to log on to a workstation and the Internet network using standard Wi-Fi connection. To verify we have to use the Active Directory domain which allows the central administration of users and definition of rules for networking as we do it at our school on regular basis. Each user will be able to save their work in-process on their own private drive, so it enables to get to user’s work on any computer connected to the local network after logging on. To share work among the members of one team, it is also possible to use the collective drive.

To see encrypted static web content, a regular web browser (Google Chrome, Internet Explorer, etc.) can be used. For the purpose of possibility to see the content outside the school network, we have found out a virtual web space using the school domain addressed as http://fec.spselitdobruska.cz. Every team is allowed to save and share their work using FTP protocol. To work in such a great amount of web space including participants’ individual accounts we use a new web server which has been set up.

You will need to install the source code editor called Visual Studio Code into a PC for every person, or at least for each group. It is available on the Internet to download for free.

To edit photographs you will need Adobe Photoshop, which our school uses frequently within multimedia lectures, so it is available on every PC already. To use it at home, you must buy it at www.adobe.com/products. But if the potential customer provides you with a good-quality photos or other pictures with a proper size and resolution, then it is not necessary to use any editors of photography.

Software Visual Studio Code (VSC)

You may use any editors to create a website, like Vim, Brackets or Atom and each editor has its pros and cons. For our project we have chosen Visual Studio Code for several reasons:

Pros and cons: ‘VSC combines the simplicity of a source code editor with powerful developer tooling. It offers less time spent on with fiddling with your PC environment and more time executing on your ideas. It is available for macOS, Linux and Windows …’ (source: https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/editor/whyvscode. It also supports the latest standards for creating websites and supports the latest programming languages. It is one of few types of software which ‘goes with times’ and developers upgrade it consequently. One of the biggest advantages is that it is for free.

Actual Course Plan

Self-Assessment: Students fill in the self-assessment sheet in order to evaluate their competences, skills and abilities (ideally as an online questionnaire).

Business idea: Students create a website for a local entrepreneur using not only the input from the lecture, or information provided by the entrepreneurs, but also using their own creativity based on teams’ cooperation.

Work Phase: Students create a website in HTML language following the steps of an input given by a professional lecturer and using her presentations. Students have a chance to test all gained information in a practical lesson led by the lecturer. The self-learning phase is guaranteed by provided online sources which offer a wide range of technical terms used while programming. They are supposed to cooperate in teams and decide what web features they are going to use and in what way to use the CSS. The teachers may play the role of customers and students have to give them a brief summary of what they have done so far.

Presentation Phase: At the end of the work phase the students will have to present their website they created in front of the teachers and other students.

Evaluation Phase: At the end the outcome of the project will be evaluated. Once again students will have to self-assess their competences. Also teachers will asses the competences of the students. In a short oral feedback both assessments will be compared and discussed. Students can be marked based on the competence sheet. The website will be presented to the entrepreneurs and their feedback will be sent to the teachers in order to discuss it with the students participating in the meeting.