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The course included weekly reading and coding assignments designed to help students locate a critical perspective on academic hypertext and build web development skills. These assignments are available on the course website. Three assignments in particular were central to the course, and merit some discussion. These assignments were the hypertext evaluation, the collaborative hypertext project, and the final academic hypertext project.

hypertext evaluation
One of the first assignments for the course involved a critical examination of one academic hypertext selected from a short list of online journals. I called this assignment a hypertext evaluation. My hope with this assignment was to show students what scholars were doing in hypertext essays, to motivate them to push beyond current conventions, and to get them to relate the theory we were reading to actual practice. I encouraged students to submit their hypertext evaluations as hypertexts. But since the course presumed no prior web development skill, and I assigned the evaluation during the third week of class, I permitted students to hand in print evaluations as a transition to web development.

collaborative hypertext project (RU Hypertext?)
The second important assignment for the course asked students to work in groups of four to five. Each group constructed its own e-journal of academic hypertexts. Each student re-wrote his or her first five-page Research in the Disciplines paper as a hypertext. These hypertexts then became the individual contributions to the collaborative e-journal. With students in at least eight different course topics for Research in the Disciplines, each e-journal included a wide range of essay topics.

The collaborative assignment is a mainstay of Web Authoring at Rutgers, and it helps students new to HTML and image editing develop skills in a supportive environment. It also gives students a sense of the way web development occurs in a professional context. In my class, the project required students to build designs that visually signaled a single e-journal issue while permitting customized design elements that reflected the individual essay topics. On a technical level, the assignment gave students some familiarity with the value of templates and cascading style sheets in web development. In terms of composition, it created an opportunity for each member of the class to create an academic hypertext and to receive comments and assistance from peers. When completed, these hypertexts served as additional venues for critical reflection about linearity, the relationship between design and content, navigation, and functionality.

final hypertext project
The final project for the course was a fully developed website for the research essay each student wrote in Research in the Disciplines. This was the place where students were to bring the technical and theoretical elements in Web Authoring together with the research and analysis in their class on research writing. Students were evaluated on the extent to which they had constructed a usable site with consistent page design tied to the textual argument, their ability to deploy visual elements clearly connected to the textual component of their project, and their use of a set of required elements that included templates and cascading style sheets. Screenshots and discussion of a range of stronger final projects appear in models.

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