J220: Coding for Journalists (online)

NOTE: Non-journalism students may also take this course, but must request enrollment here: https://forms.gle/ai53qxezzsn9kZc87

 

This course introduces foundational concepts of computer programming and computational thinking in ways they would be used in the journalism industry. Students who have successfully completed earlier versions of this course have gone on to work in newsrooms in roles as newsroom developers, data journalists, or as reporters who have used various tools to aid in their research (e.g. scraping government records). Others wield the knowledge of coding to help play a role in forging the future of the journalism industry as it grapples with insurmountable technological disruption.

This course will start with teaching students HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, both to produce interactive and visually compelling interactives and to understand the underlying framework that drives the web. The course then transitions into Python programming, where students will explore how to scrape, clean, and analyze data to support data-driven reporting. By the end of the semester, students will apply their coding skills to a final project that has them build a simple web app to create a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) AI engine using API calls. This final project will be a culmination of all of the skills they learned over the semester, and give students hands-on experience with how A.I. and automation are transforming the landscape of the news business.

Modality: Online Flex Attendance
This is an online only class. Students may attend live online via Zoom at the regularly scheduled class time, or watch pre-recorded videos asynchronously following the course modules.

There will be one collaborative assignment. Students who attend asynchronously will be required to connect with classmates on the design of this project. Each person will submit individually for this assignment. 

Regardless of the modality chosen, viewing lectures each week is required. Special software in bCourses tracks whether the pre-recorded videos were played all the way through without skipping. Those attending the live Zoom portion will be exempt from watching the asynchronous videos that week. While students can switch modalities from week-to-week, those attending the Zoom portion must commit to attending the whole three-hour lecture and attendance will be taken at the end of the session through a form posted in the Zoom chat at the end of the lecture. If anyone needs to leave early, they will be required to watch the pre-recorded video modules to earn attendance grade for that particular week. 

Asynchronous videos for each week are released Monday morning at 9am. This allows the class to move together at the same pace.