Human-Computer Interaction (SIT32002) - General Syllabus
This general syllabus is not year-specific. The course-takers should find the syllabus of the year in the intranet of HGU.
Course Introduction
This course will give a broad understanding of the human, computer, and interactions between the human and computer; and provide practical experiences in such as planning, user-friendly design, prototyping, engineering analysis, and usability evaluation to implementing an HCI application.
This course consists of 24 classe sessions (= 12 weeks), not 32 classes (= 16 weeks). There will be two introductory classes (= 1 week), 22 classes (= 11 weeks) of practice/project/discussion (PPD), then the course will end at around 12th or 13th week. The remaining 8 classes (= 4 weeks) will be given as online lectures that parallelly go with the course schedule.
PPD sessions
The PPD (Practice, Project, and Discussion) session is the essential concept of this course. Every week, students MUST take assigned online lectures (about 60-to-70-minute-length per week) and write an essay before they come to the class. In class, students will learn specific theories by practicing and discussing in groups. Also, students will participate in one project through the full course schedule (about three months). Students will participate in their team project once every week under the supervision of the professor. The designated activities regarding the project that are not completed in class time should be done as homework.
Online lectures
Total of 600 min (eight-class amount) of videos will be provided through Prof. Lee’s GitHub Page: https://handonghci.github.io/Courses/.
Course Objectives
Upon completion of the course, students will be able to
- explain the characteristics of each of the human, computer, and interaction with the perspective as HCI designer/engineer;
- describe HCI knowledge and principles in computer/mobile/web interactions as well as physical interactions;
- apply HCI design principles and design guidelines in a design process to develop a human-centered HCI system;
- identify and analyze user needs, socio-environmental issues, and stakeholders’ requirements in different HCI domains;
- and as an HCI practitioner, discuss HCI-related issues (e.g., ethical issues, social issues) in different HCI domains.
Assignments and Exams
- Individual assignments: 10 essay writings
- Group assignments: progress reports for the team project
- Examination
- Mid-term exam (around W7 until W9)
- Final-term exam (around W13 until W16)
- Both mid-term and final-term exams are the essay-styled take-home exam with about 7+ days period.
- See “Assignmetns and Grading” below for more information
Teaching Philosophy
Role of Professor
To say about the knowledge, there are different types: (1) information as common knowledge, (2) knowledge earned by understanding, (3) empirical knowledge gained by experience, (4) skills, (5) meta-knowledge, et cetera. The information or common knowledge that are shared and distributed through various internet media such as blogs, news, and YouTube are not focused to care in this course. Re-providing that easily-findable knowledge in a classroom is not meaningful as high-level education in the university. Also, delivering a huge amount of information (even that is necessary for the coursework) by a lecturer in the small classroom is almost impossible as well as an inefficient way of information delivery. Instead, earning in-depth and empirical knowledge (by hands-on experiences through discussion, practice, writing, and projects) that cannot be easily acquired from the internet media should be majorly offered by professional tutoring in the classroom.
The role of the professor in this course is a facilitator or tutor, not just a lecturer. As the facilitator, I guide students to know what to see and where to find any necessary knowledge about the course contents. I spend a lot of hours to carefully select 600 minutes of essential YouTube videos (and other media sources) that are informative, visually well-made, delivering meaningful knowledge, appropriate in the level of knowledge depth, and interesting not that boring. My role is to give meaningful questions that can be solved through critical, creative, and collaborative thinking, also to provide good reference information to expand students’ knowledge and understanding. Then, during class time, I will guide students to earn sufficient experient by discussion, practice, project activities, and other hands-on experiences. As a tutor, I’d like to know each of my student in person through various channels so that I sincerely hope to communicate with each of them to make his/her study successfully finished through the semester.
Role of Students
All the activities in the classroom will be conducted by teams. Therefore, individual activity in the classroom is not appropriate, and students will be requested to actively participate in a group. Therefore, active, positive, collaborative and enthusiastic mindsets as a learner are highly required. Students MUST take online lectures (about 60-75 minutes lengths) and write an essay assignment before they come to class. Please do not hesitate to ask and discuss anything that you’ve wanted to know. The participation of each student will be evaluated by the professor.
This course requires students to submit multiple essay writings including mid- and final-terms exams. Please describe your own thoughts, insights, and philosophy about issues related to this course. Use your academic knowledge and personal experiences to explain. The essay writings will not be that easy to produce but it requires students to squeeze their brain and percolate ideas to melt all the related knowledge into short sentences. Therefore, if necessary, enjoy to learn yourself from anywhere (from internet media, from classmates, or from the professor) to write your opinion about the topic. Writing should reveal the author’s efforts of thinking and their time spent for the writing, therefore I can so easily see those efforts by reading the article. I encourage you to have enough time to prepare own article earnestly.
In team projects, students have the responsibility to actively participate in their team activities. For the presentations, show fruitful outcomes of own projects as professionally as possible with well-prepared materials.
Finally, as my educational duty, I’ve gladly spent lots of time to see each student of my class in person. Please come to me at least once during the semester. To effectively excel my education into the class, this individual meeting is compulsory for all students.
Assignments
Essay Writing
Philosophy of essay writing
- The essay writing is aimed to help students to have clear understandings and ideas regarding HCI topics delivered through the course.
- The essay is NOT a report or a summary of knowledge. The essay, just like a diary, is to express students’ thoughts, ideas, opinions, arguments, discussion, agreements, or critiques in non-strict writing styles or formats. There’s NO answer for the essay topics, but the essays will be evaluated by the professor in terms of such as clarity of opinion, rationality of argument, creativity about new ideas, depth of own philosophy about the topic, and so forth.
- For your understanding about my education philosophy on the essay writing, I share this 세바시 talk, which is spoken in Korean. Note that I will not use the peer evaluation concept introduced in this video.
Writing Guideline
- Use the shared essay form (Download from HERE)
- Font: Batang & Times New Roman
- Font size: 12 pt.
- Line height: 1.5
- Do NOT put your name or student ID. Due to the open source policy of this course, some of selected essays will be anonymously (without including the name and student-ID of the author) shared to public through the Google Drive.
- Putting any own sketches or drawings are highly recommended.
- Minimum requirements
- Number of pages: MINIMUM of TWO A4 pages
- Language: English at least 5 out of 10 essays
- Upload: Save your essay as PDF, then upload your essay to the LMS system (https://lms.handong.edu/).
- Honor code
- Students should NOT just reuse (copy and paste) sentences from other’s articles. But they can rephrase others’ ideas to express your own opinion.
- Students can freely open books, search internet sites, and discuss with others to find own answers; however, they should NOT share any of your written sentences to others.
- Evaluation
- Depth of thoughts
- Rationality of opinion
- Creativity for new ideas
- Keeping the minimum page limit
- Late essay: -50% (any late essays are acceptable until no later than week 16)
- Evaluation scheme: excellent (1.0), wonderful (0.9), great (0.8), very good (0.7), good (0.6)
- Sample essays: HERE
Essay topics
- Please find essay topics from HERE.
- The topics can be changed as time flows.
Team Project
- Teams will be assignment based on their preferences in project topics.
- Evaluation of team project
- Students will do a peer evaluation about the content and quality of presentation of each team using the following evaluation scheme. (Example of peer evaluation form: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1hGG-xeyU8iljVkyRgmruuCebny2jTlrP)
- The professor will evaluate not only the presentation but also the contents and quality of each project.
- Self-evaluation: There will be self-evaluation for own efforts, participation, and contribution in the team using the following form.
- There will be no peer evaluation within own team. The peer-evaluated presentation score and professor’s score will be same to all team members of each team. But, personal scores in the same team can be different based on the self-evaluation.
Examination
- Both the mid-term and final-term exams will be given as the essay-styled take-home exam with about one week period.
- There will be three major topics with having 3 to 4 detailed sub-questions. Amounts: about 10 pages in total.
- Writing guideline (similar to essay writing)
- Use the shared essay form (Download: https://goo.gl/Lh7d4a)
- Language: English or Korean
- Upload: Save all in ONE PDF file, then upload to LMS system.
- Honor code
- Students should NOT just reuse (copy and paste) any sentences from other’s articles. But, they can rephrase others’ ideas to express your own opinion.
- Students can freely open books, search internet sites, and discuss with others to find own answers; however, they should NOT share any of your written sentences to others.
- Evaluation
- There will be a minus point if the minimum amount is not satisfied.
- There will be a minus point for the late submission.
- Details can be updated while the course is operation during the semester.
Grading
I personally have a disagreeing opinion of the ABCDF-based grading system. 0-to-100 scale will be more meaningful, instead. Though, personal efforts in the class and what they earned by each of the various students’ activities (e.g., team projects, discussion, practices, essay writings, online lectures, exams, et cetera) will be evaluated anyhow, but the final score or the grade is not the most suitable criteria that well explain students’ learning levels. I hope, therefore, students carefully think themselves about which knowledge they have earned for the future career and about how they participated in the course, instead of focusing on their score or grade that they will get as the results.
Attendance is the right of students as they paid for their learning, not a responsibility that could be evaluated; therefore, there is no evaluation of students’ attendance. However, uninformed absences or late attendances will be reflected in participation criteria (10%) because the active participation in class is one of the highly required attitudes in this course.
General grading scheme
- Participation (10%)
- Essay assignment (20%; 10 essays)
- Mid-term examination (15%; 10-page essay style)
- Final examiination (15%; 10-page essay style)
- Project (40%)
- Progress (20%)
- Effort (5%)
- Final report (5%)
- Mid-term presentation (5%)
- Final presentation (5%)
Schedule
See the syllabus shared via Hisnet or HERE
Miscellaneous
Open source policy
All lecturing materials of Prof. Lee’s courses are shared through his Google Drive.
Extended Syllabus (full version)
How to use LMS?
- Go to our LMS system (http://lms.handong.edu/). Click “마이페이지” at the right-top corner. Log-in using the Hisnet ID (ID: student number)
- App download: Search and install “LearningX Student” from Google Play or App Store
Notes
- The course schedule can be adjusted by considering an overall schedule of the semester (e.g., mid-term period, festival, …), the professor’s schedule, and/or students’ needs.
- The freshman and 2nd grade students are not allowed to take this course if he/she doesn’t have sufficient coding skills.