Below is information about Spring 2021 courses offered for the IS major.
The Campus Course Schedule provides additional information on our courses. Please make sure to read the section text in the Course Explorer Schedule under each section to find details on restrictions.
General Restriction Information:
- Many IS and INFO courses have restrictions until a certain date to allow for declared Information Science Majors to have priority registration into these courses. The majority of the courses will open (restrictions lifted) one week before classes begin in the Spring.
- IS 101, 202, 199 SHG, 266, 390 FCE: Not Restricted to Majors (390 must be Sophomores or above)
- IS 100: Always Restricted to IS Majors
- IS 204, 205, 206, & select 400s: Restricted until 1/18/21 by noon to majors
- Other IS courses not listed above: Restricted until 12/18/20 by noon to majors
- Level restrictions will not be lifted (undergraduates are not allowed in the graduate sections, and students must be the correct level such as Junior and above to register, as lisited in the course explorer).
- Informatics (INFO) Minors please refer to your INFO Minor advisor for additional information
- Undergraduate Sections: Students must register for the Undergraduate section for courses when relevant (400-level courses).
Questions may be sent to ischool-is@illinois.edu
These classes are specifically required within the IS degree.
NOT OFFERED SPRING 2021: IS 203 Analytical Foundations for Information Problems (3 hr.)
IS & INFO ELECTIVE COURSES
Data Science Discovery is the intersection of statistics, computation, and real-world relevance. As a project-driven course, students perform hands-on-analysis of real-world datasets to analyze and discover the impact of the data. Throughout each experience, students reflect on the social issues surrounding data analysis such as privacy and design.
A survey of the history of gaming from the ancient world through the twentieth century, and its impact on science, society, and culture.
This course introduces students to fundamental theories and techniques in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). This course presents basic tools and methods for creating, designing, prototyping, and evaluating user interfaces to computing applications and web sites. Students will explore course content by conducting individual and group hands-on projects. Assignments involving prototyping can be implemented by self-selected solutions, e.g. Axure, JavaScript. Students from all backgrounds are welcomed.
How do communities contribute to transformative, world-changing innovations? Why is their participation indispensable for fostering change? And what makes change ultimately transformative across diverse spaces and time? Community Innovation explores how engagement with interdisciplinary communities and collaborations, as well as histories of globally-changing local innovations from the Illinois were critical to fostering and sustaining new social and technical practices across space and time.
Explores use and application of technology to scholarly activity in the humanities, including projects that put classic texts on the web or create multimedia application on humanities topics.
Explores use and application of technology to scholarly activity in the humanities, including projects that put classic texts on the web or create multimedia application on humanities topics.
An overview of youth literacies covering: popular literacy myths, censorship, cognitive processes behind reading, visual and digital literacies, contemporary youth practices, government policies, and literacy education in schools. Course readings include fictional works and scholarship from the fields of education, library science, history, media studies, critical race studies, and literary and cultural studies. Students learn the history of marginalized youth in America in order to understand how literacies are defined, promoted, or stigmatized today.
Community engagement seeks to better engage with and for community to achieve long-term and sustainable outcomes, processes, relationships, or discourse, and may include collaborations with groups of people affiliated by geographic proximity, special interest, or similar situations. This introductory course will explore some of the different definitions, models, guiding principles, and core values.
All in the Gutter: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Comics: This course is a critical, historical, scholarly exploration of US comics engagement with race, gender, and sexuality. Reading comics from a range of genres and formats from the past 150 years, we will consider 1) how comics have affirmed and challenged social and cultural norms, 2) changing visual, textual, authorial, and publishing conventions for comics engaging with race, gender, and sexuality, and 3) the ways visual culture problematizes the representation and circulation of complex identities. This course will count as GenEds for iSchool students (other students should confirm with their college): Humanities & the Arts and also Cultural Studies: U.S. Minority Cultures.
Venue for presentation and discussion of research and professional activities by faculty, students, staff, and guest speakers.
This course provides a deep hands-on sociotechnical dive into technology including electronics, software, and networks culminating in a holistic understanding of networked information systems. The course also explores the methodological landscape of networked information systems including theoretical assumptions, research methods, and research techniques. Throughout, students will be introduced to, and make active use of, skillsets, frameworks, and standards employed by a wide range of information professionals in selecting, co-designing, appropriating, and innovating-in-use networked information systems.
This course introduces students to data science approaches that have emerged from recent advances in programming and computing technology. They will learn to collect and use data from a variety of sources, including the web, in a modern statistical inference and visualization paradigm. The course will be based in the programming language R, but will also use HTML, regular expressions, basic unix tools, XML, and SQL. Supervised and unsupervised statistical learning techniques made possible by recent advances in computing power will also be covered.
Fundamental principles of the art of storytelling including techniques of adaptation and presentation; content and sources of materials; methods of learning; practice in storytelling; planning the story hour for school and public libraries and other public information settings; and audio, video, and digital media.
Evaluation, selection and use of books and other resources for young adults (ages 12-18) in public libraries and school media centers; explores standard selection criteria for print and nonprint materials in all formats and develops the ability to evaluate and promote materials according to their various uses (personal and curricular) and according to young adults' various needs (intellectual, emotional, social and physical).
Human culture provides an ideal testbed for students exploring data science, because the interpretive challenges that lurk beneath the surface in other domains become starkly visible here. For instance, cultural materials usually come to analysts as unstructured texts, images, or sound files, forcing explicit decisions about data modeling and feature extraction. Cultural questions also highlight the importance of interpreting statistical models in relation to a social context. Last but not least: songs, poems, and stories confront us with vivid problems that are inherently fun to explore. This course will start by reviewing descriptive and inferential statistics, and build up to applications of supervised and unsupervised machine learning. We will apply those methods to a range of cultural materials using them to model the pace of stylistic change in popular music, for instance, and the representation of gender in fiction.
Introduces students to a range of rapid prototyping techniques and methods to analyze needs, opportunities and design spaces. Students will work in teams to develop ideas for novel computational devices or applications to meet identified needs. Covers the interlinked entrepreneurial skills of identifying an unmet need, exploiting technological opportunities, exploring a design space to refine an idea, and communicating a design vision through demonstrations with prototypes and proofs of concept. This enables developers to show how their envisaged working interactive technology will be used productively in a particular real-life context. Communicating the vision of computational devices is a challenge because dynamic use in context is hard for people other than the device's developers to imagine. The ability to produce convincing, clear, powerful demonstrations even at the early stages of a project is a highly valuable entrepreneurial skill, and also highly applicable within an organization. Directed and supervised investigation of selected topics in information studies that may include among others the social, political, and historical contexts of information creation and dissemination; computers and culture; information policy; community information systems; production, retrieval and evaluation of knowledge; computer-mediated communication.
**Course was previously IS 490IT, and you may find additional information about this course, including a past syllabus, here.
A survey of key concepts in an emerging field that studies how local, historical communities are using information and communications technologies. Covers key principles for work in the non-profit/public sector as people harness new technologies and media as individuals, students, families, community organizations, and so on. Overarching ideas prepare both professionals and researchers to understand and master this environment, whatever their technology background. Especially useful for those interested in public or community libraries, youth services, social work, education, and anyone interested in working with or studying underserved communities.
This interdisciplinary course introduces students to fundamental theories, methods, technologies and applications of social computing. Students learn about this emerging discipline from two perspectives: First, basic principles of collective information production and processing, and methods for studying these principles. Topics include prediction markets, games with a purpose, open source software development, social media, social networks, information visualization, and online games. Second, socio-technical aspects of the design and usage of respective technologies. This includes participation, privacy and security. Students learn how to solve problems in social computing in a systematic and rigorous fashion. At the end of the course, students will be able to design, manage and execute social computing projects for scholarly and commercial use, and to critically assess work in this area.
This course focuses on the basics of web site design, content development, constructing web pages with standard HTML and CSS. We will also cover usability and accessibility, content management system options, multi-media and interactivity in the context of standard HTML and CSS, procedures and policies for organizations, with a concentration on public, academic and special libraries. Students will investigate, design, and draft a representative site. Students may work with non-profit and library clients in constructing and redesigning their web sites or design and construct their own personal professional pages. In this course we will learn how to design and deploy flexible websites that serve dynamically changing content, focusing in particular on the needs of public-service organizations such as libraries, associations, and other not-for-profit entities.
Covers common data, document processing, and programming constructs and concepts. Focuses on problem solving and abstraction with a programming language. By the end of the course students will be able to design, develop and test a moderately complex computer program to manage full text, bibliographic records or multimedia. The course prepares students for working with applications in data analytics, data science, digital libraries, text mining and knowledge management. No prior programming background is assumed.
In this immersive and experiential course, students consider "playfulness" as a key aspect of design methodologies and practices. Looking closely at the philosophical, social, and relational dynamics of play, we will explore how playful approaches to design thinking, game design, and other gameful methodologies can encourage collaboration, engagement, and emergent, transformative solutions to a range of challenges that face us in our rapidly-changing, information-based culture. The course aims to build student competency in design methods through a sequence of game design experiences arising from a broad consideration of play.
A course in the use and evaluation of Web application frameworks for system architects, designers, and developers. Experience in creating static Web sites using HTML and CSS.
Studio-based learning methods, which are common in art and architectural education, are used to help students address a real-world problem or 'case'. Working in teams and mentored by the instructor and experts, students will learn how to 'be a professional' in an environment in which process is as important as project. During the term, students will participate in a cyclical process of design creation, presentation and critique culminating in a final presentation during the final day(s) of class of the finished proposal/design of how to address the case. Assumes experience in community engagement within a social justice framework.
Data visualization is crucial to conveying information drawn from models, observations or investigations. This course will provide an overview of historical and modern techniques for visualizing data, drawing on quantitative, statistical, and network-focused datasets. Topics will include construction of communicative visualizations, the modern software ecosystem of visualization, and techniques for aggregation and interpretation of data through visualization. Particular attention will be paid to the Python ecosystem and multi-dimensional quantitative datasets.
Covers how to evaluate, select and manage information systems that will be used in the daily operation of libraries and information centers. Includes the systems used by technical staff and the information consumers. Course will focus on information as a product. Attention is given to the operation of an organization as a whole and the impact of change on the integration of resources, work flow and usability. Formal methods for modeling systems, and industry practice techniques of analysis are used to address these problems and opportunities.
The course provides students with both theoretical and practical training in good database design. By the end of the course students will create a conceptual data model using entity-relationship diagrams, understand the importance of referential integrity and how to enforce data integrity constraints when creating a database. Students will be proficient in writing basic queries in the structured query language (SQL) and have a general understanding of relational database theory including normalization.
An introduction to understanding data as a source for storytelling and to telling stories based on data. This process will include understanding and analyzing data sets to find informative aspects, changes, or contrasts that will provide the basic information for developing stories. Course participants will learn storytelling concepts, narrative theories, and performance techniques and develop stories in a collaborative workshop style. Students will work with data visualization toolkits, which will involve variable levels of coding and skill. By using storytelling techniques with data, students can develop, and tell well-vevidenced stories, organizations can make better data-driven decisions.
The course provides an introduction to the concepts, technologies, practices and challenges of Information Assurance. It takes a broad view of Information Security and Privacy and covers the essential principles for the protection of information systems; the relevant technologies; organizational concerns; policies, human aspects; legal approaches; criminology; and ethical issues. Students will gain an appreciation for the difficulty of designing, developing, deploying and maintaining information systems, services and software products that are secure and comply with expectations of security and privacy.
The course will address common ethical challenges related to data including privacy, bias, and data access. These challenges will be explored through real-world cases of corporate settings, non-profits, governments, academic research, and healthcare. The course emphasizes the complexity of ethical decision-making and that trade-offs between priorities are often necessary. The course also considers how the burdens of addressing ethical concerns should be distributed among stakeholders. Students will be introduced to a range of relevant policy responses at the organizational, institutional, governmental,and supranational levels.
This course addresses issues in Data Management, Curation & Reproducibility from a Data Science perspective. We discuss definitions of data science, and then introduce and use the Data Science Life Cycle as an intellectual foundation. Topics include Research Artifact Identification and Management, Metadata, Repositories, Economics of Artifact Preservation and Sustainability, and Data Management Plans. We use the case study to ground our discussions in both data sets and in specific data science research. This course requires a final project that applies course knowledge to a data science experiment and creates a data management plan for that experiment.
In this course, students will learn about and develop professional skills in the information sciences, a broad and interdisciplinary field at the intersection of people, information, and technology. Students will engage in professional skill building for a broad range of employment in the information professions with a specific focus on internship and career readiness.
Requires Instructor approval, Email John Weible at jweible@illinois.edu. Database Administration & Scaling for IS. Prerequisite: IS 455 - Database Design & Prototyping. Involves database administration (DBA) broadly relevant to computational information science work. Explores several types of scalable database engines, using popular NOSQL and SQL products. Develops practical skills for managing reliable DBMS for production systems or to create analytically-focused NOSQL derivatives. Small student teams will experiment and present findings to the class, with student-directed inquiry encouraged. Readings, discussions, and situational problems drawn from real scenarios will involve managerial, ethical, and other aspects of the human side of professional DBA work. Some intro to virtual machines and cloud systems administration is included.
Interdisciplinary Methods in Research Computing addresses technical and soft skills in managing computer-based research. Relevant to both technical and newly technical student researchers from disciplines across campus. This course will cover data management; process management and task automation; and research project management. Topics include data organization in spreadsheets, document revision control, data visualization, robust testing strategies, and reproducibility. Meets with ENGR 498 IM.
Broad introduction to the nature, capabilities, and limitations of computing. Topics range from the way data is represented and stored, to the way today's computers work, to the general ideas of algorithms and computational efficiency, to the future of computing. Covers "Great Ideas" across various areas of the field, including, for example, cryptography and internet security, problem solving, modeling and simulation, and artificial intelligence.
The ability to communicate effectively in multiple types of media is a crucial part of literacy in our society. In this course, students will explore the intersections of various media: print, film, images, sound, etc. Students will consider the ways in which writing--as an object and as a practice--is shaped by multimodal interactions. Also integrates practical activities with broader theoretical issues in order to provide effective strategies for designing multimedia presentations, projects, and texts that integrate photography, video, and sound.
Digital media is an immensely pervasive and powerful form of communication that despite its rapid growth has yet to reach most of the world's population. This lecture-based survey course for undergraduates traces the history and formation of personal computing and the Internet, the development of virtual communities and virtual worlds, evolving forms of digital representation and communication, digital visual cultures, features of new media industries, and the rise of participatory media. Evaluation and assessment is based on written exams, quizzes, class discussion in section, and practice-based assignments using new media technologies such as wikis, blogs, games, and digital video. Emphasis is on mastering key concepts of digital media through theory and history, and on critical discussion of distinctive features of digital media objects. Lectures and discussion sections are held in computer-equipped classrooms.
This interdisciplinary course uses the lens of gender critique and pairs it with social activism to provide students analytical tools to engage with, reshape, and create digital cultures. Examines recent research and public policies related to the gendered, raced, and classes dimensions of digital cultures and inequality; the broad range of labor issues embedded in the growing income disparity related to digital cultures; the various ways that digital inequality has been defined by public policy, sociologists, and activists, and real examples of collective activism and social change related to emerging technologies.
The emphasis of this course is on developing an understanding of top down video game design using the various design methodologies and tools introduced in class. Students will form small groups (4-6) and work on their own design within a selected genre (to be determined at the beginning of the semester). Areas of focus include high level design vision, audience evaluation, User Interface and its impact on the design, iteration of a series of design documents (high, medium and low level) and the team dynamics of communication, critique and integration. The goal of the class is to have the small teams use the concepts and the tools taught in class to create a complete design document that will be cataloged for later use.
- Makerspace: Game Studies - This course is a foray into game studies via makerspace production mediums. Students will study the role of play, tinkering and gaming in design, research and innovation and be challenged to learn a variety of makerspace production tools and techniques to create games. This course will include three major components (1) physical board game design, (2) introductory computer game design and (3) investigation into the narrative themes, artistic production, interaction mechanics and culture that make games engaging. During the course, students will prototype both playable board and video games, followed by iterating through to a final version of a game of their choice. Class will meet in the CU Community Fab Lab in Art Annex II. Students who have taken a different makerspace class before are encouraged to enroll. This section is for undergraduate students only. Graduate students should register for CRN 65144. Course materials and assignments will be hosted on Moodle at learn.illinois.edu.
- Makerspace: Escape Rooms - This course will explore the intersection of storytelling, interaction design, and user experience through the design of escape rooms. In the past couple years escape rooms have been on the rise, changing from simple locked boxes in an open room to complex adventures spanning multiple rooms involving electronics, sound design, storytelling, and even live actors. This class will be primarily focusing on the manufacturing and electronics work that goes into making an immersive but self-contained escape room in a box experience. Over the span of the course, students will become familiar with the basics of several advanced small-scale manufacturing tools, such as laser engravers, electronic cutters, and 3D printers/scanners. The primary focus, however, will be a more in depth exploration of small board electronics – such as Arduino and IoT programming – and hardware – such as sensors, servos, LEDs, and other components. This section is for undergraduate students only. Graduate students should register for CRN 62685. Course materials and assignments will be hosted on Moodle at learn.illinois.edu.
- The Video Game Dev Process - The emphasis of this course is understanding the video game development process as seen in current Game Studios. The course will focus on key elements of the process including each phase of the development timeline, scheduling, prototyping, iteration, QA, game builds and player research. Students will form small teams (4-6 with the goal of using the concepts taught in class to create a video game from a catalog of pre-existing designs. Considering the limited time frame of the semester, the state of the final product is not as important as understanding the game develop cycle. Knowledge of a programming engine (preferably Unity) is desired but not a pre-requisite. Students are required to log in and use Compass2g (compass2g.illinois.edu) in order to complete this course.
- Machines, Data and the Python - INFO 490 MH2: Machines, Data and the Python (https://uicourses.web.illinois.edu/info490mh2) continues where the INFO 490 MH tour (https://uicourses.web.illinois.edu/info490mh) left off. You will learn advanced techniques in data science and be introduced to machine learning algorithms. You will also continue to improve your Python knowledge as well as your software development skills including how to architect large scale data processing pipelines. Although this an an applied course (you will learn by doing), you'll also learn how and why something works. In many cases, you will first write a reduced implementation before using an established library. Mastering the ability to write software to gain insights from data will help drive your research and career. The last four weeks of the class will be spent on a data driven project that will give you a chance to work on your own interests and showcase your knowledge and skills. The class will be taught on-line and be scheduled asynchronously (you decide where it best fits in your week). Prerequisites • Junior/Senior/Graduate Standing • Taken INFO490 MH Intro to Prog for Data Sci OR have at least 2 years of programming experience using Python • Already comfortable with Numpy, Pandas, Matplotlib, NLTK • Voraciously willing to do the necessary work to fill in any knowledge gaps • Enjoy contributing and learning in an on-line environment • the ability to create a boolean expression for these prerequisites Contact the instructor (Mike Haberman, haberman@illinois.edu) if you want to be considered for one of the slots in this course. There are limited seats available and the instructor will use the following criteria to prioritize who gets to enroll: 1) Last semester seniors/grad students who either took INFO 490 MH or have the prereqs 2) Last year seniors/grads who either took INFO 490 MH or have the prereqs 3) Juniors who took INFO 490MH 4) Sophomores who took INFO 490MH 5)Juniors with the prereqs 6)Sophomores with the prereqs
- Intro to Prog for Data Science - NOTE: Students must be enrolled in this course by 12 pm on Thursday, Sept. 5, 2019. Enrollment in this course will be shut down at that point and no new students will be allowed to enroll. Introduction to Programming for Data Science is for students who want to learn about solving problems common in data sciences but have little or no programming experience. The class is asynchronous (students can access material on-line but within specified timeframes) and taught online. Data Science lies at the intersection of statistics and computer science and focuses on extracting information from data. This class will immerse students on topics of software construction, design, programming paradigms and the semantic and syntax of the Python language and then focus on some of the necessary workflows to move raw data into information. The class will explore common Python modules (libraries) used in data science, natural language processing, statistics, mathematics, data management (acquiring, cleaning, reshaping, organizing, persisting) and visualizations. Sample course material can be viewed at: https://info490fa19.web.illinois.edu/ This is ONLINE and ASYNCHRONOUS (there is no regular meeting day/time). Students who have completed INFO 490 RB Foundations of Data Science or INFO 490 RB2 Advanced Data Science should not register for this course as it will be considered duplicate credit (which does not count towards graduation).
- CNC Fundmtls for Fabricators (Computer Numerical Control) - Exploring CNC machines to discover how they work from the ground up. Each student will assemble, wire, and program a small desktop CNC machine to develop a better understanding of each component's role. Upon completion of the course, students will have the knowledge to self-familiarize with any CNC device they encounter or to customize a machine to meet their needs. Previous experience with digital design software is helpful, but not required. This class is open to sophomores, juniors, seniors and graduate students. All students need to register for lecture and one lab section. Students are required to log in and use Moodle (learn.illinois.edu) and zoom (https://illinois.zoom.us/) in order to complete this course.
- BIO BEATS - In 2012, Genentech, a biotechnology company that presented at a TED talk on how to utilize human DNA to create strands of sound that could be used to produce music from the human body. Additionally, in 2016 Dr. Hong at MIT presented a project called Bioteria Beats that used bacteria from the human anatomy to produce sounds that could be used to make a Hip-Hop track. Bio Beats is designed to build on those ideas. Bio Beats is designed to produce a creative explosion between bioengineering and Hip Hop. Our goal is to use the foundation of Hip Hop, a culture that is rooted in black music traditions and lived experiences to explore pathways to address chronic illnesses such as diabetes, heart disease, hypertension, and now the Coronavirus in the black community. We will work, discover, and build with citizen scientists from indigenous neighborhoods to create algorithms to produce new products and processes designed to improve the health and wellness of high-risk communities. Upon course completion: ● Students will be able to conceptualize and synthesize solutions to address chronic illnesses such as diabetes, hypertension, and obesity in urban communities. ● Students will develop prototypes for products and services that fuse fashion design, bioengineering, and entrepreneurship into proposed ventures. Bio Beats will meet on Tuesday 10-11:50 am for lecture online. Face to face labs will meet in the Siebel Center for Design on Thursdays 10-11:50 STARTING ON March 11, 2020. Contact the instructor if you have questions: wmpatter@illinois.edu