Course Descriptions & Past Syllabi - Bachelor of Science in Information Science (InfoSci)

The proliferation of social media – social networking websites, blogging and microblogging, and other forms of online interaction and content generation – has introduced a powerful tool for people to communicate and share information. This course will introduce methods for analyzing and understanding how people use these technologies and their societal implications.

An introduction to relational databases for students with no previous programming experience. Provides a means for students of diverse backgrounds to successfully learn how to store, retrieve, and maintain data in relational databases. Topics include a brief comparison of database systems with an emphasis on relational databases, fundamental relational database concepts, and data types. Includes technical approaches to accessing information stored in relational databases.

An introduction to computer programming for students with very limited or no previous programming experience. Topics include fundamental programming concepts such as variables, data types, assignments, arrays, conditionals, loops, functions, and I/O operations.

Students will acquire, hone, and learn to apply foundational information literacy skills for research and application including: ethical information use and creation; information accessibility; and interpreting scholarly discourse.

Examining effects of new information technologies on how we conduct business, interact with friends, and go through our daily lives. Understanding how technical and social factors have influenced evolution of information society. Evaluating the transformative power of information in education, policy, and entertainment—and the dark side of these changes.

In this course, you will learn about the state-of-the-art Web-based tools that allow you to efficiently display and analyze a large number of datasets in a way many professionals working in the Earth science domain would. You will learn, how to visualize multiple Earth science datasets produced by NASA in a variety of ways directly on the Internet, without the need to download, manage and store them. Students will be introduced to comprehensive functions to analyze the data and generate customized maps, animations, multi-variable correlations, regional subsetting, etc. Not only will students will acquire theoretical and practical skills necessary to analyze the data, but they will also learn, how to interpret the data, extract knowledge and connect it to socio-economic information.

Examining the effects of new information technologies on how we conduct business, interact with friends, and go through our daily lives. Understanding how technical and social factors have influenced the evolution of information society. Evaluating the transformative power of information in education, policy, and entertainment, and the dark side of these changes.

Introductory course examining the theories, concepts, and principles of information, information representation, indexing, record structures, and presentation of information. Topics to be covered include the methods and strategies to develop systems for storage, organization, and retrieval of information in a variety of organizational and institutional settings.

This course is an introduction to descriptive and inferential statistics, graphical techniques, and the computer analysis of data. Topics to be covered include basic procedures of hypothesis testing, correlation and regression analysis, and the analysis of continuous and binary dependent variables.

This course is an introduction to programming, emphasizing understanding and implementation of applications using object-oriented techniques. Topics to be covered include program design and testing as well as implementation of programs.

This course is an introduction to databases, the relational model, entity-relationship diagrams, user-oriented database design and normalization, and Structured Query Language (SQL). Through labs, tests, and a project, students develop both theoretical and practical knowledge of relational database systems.

Team development and the principles, methods and types of leadership will be a focus with an emphasis on goal setting, motivation, problem solving, and conflict resolution. This course examines the principles of managing team projects in organizations through planning and execution including estimating costs, managing risks, scheduling, staff and resource allocation, communication, tracking, and control.

This course examines the basic concepts of local and wide-area computer networking including an overview of services provided by networks, network topologies and hardware, packet switching, client/server architectures, network protocols, and network servers and applications. The principles and techniques of information organization and architecture for the Web environment will be covered along with such topics as management, security, authentication, and policy issues associated with distributed systems.

This course will focus on the use of information by individuals, including the theories, concepts, and principles of information, information behavior and mental models. Methods for determining information behavior and user needs, including accessibility issues will be examined and strategies for using information technology to support individual users and their specific needs will be explored.

A critical determinant of success for information professionals is being a good decision maker. But why is it that we don’t always make rational and logical choices? How can we improve the quality of our judgments and choices? This course examines the use of information in individual and organizational decision making, including the role of quantitative data analysis in making informed choices. The course has two main goals. The first is to introduce you to a variety of psychological perspectives on decision making, with an emphasis on errors of judgment and choice. The second is to introduce you to a variety of quantitative tools to help you make informed decisions when analyzing data.

This course is an introduction to human-computer interaction (HCI). This course focuses on how HCI connects psychology, information systems, computer science, and human factors. User-centered design and user interface implementation methods discussed include identifying user needs, understanding user behaviors, envisioning interfaces, and utilizing prototyping tools, with an emphasis on incorporating people in the design process from initial field observations to summative usability testing.

Cybersecurity is fundamentally a problem of human interaction with technology, but its technical challenges are better understood than its human challenges. This course is designed to give you an overview of human interactions with cybersecurity technology, from users to system designers. Using the information gleaned in this course, you should be able to make better predictions about how people react to cybersecurity policies and tools, and how those reactions shape organizational behavior. The earlier part of the course focuses on explanations for behavior, while the later parts of the course focus more on the development and evaluation of tools for assisting people in cybersecurity.

Evaluates major privacy and security questions raised by big data, Internet of things (IoT), wearables, ubiquitous sensing, social sharing platforms, and other AI-driven systems. Covers history of research ethics and considers how ethical frameworks can and should be applied to digital data.

This course will be an exploration of the methods, tools, and processes for developing dynamic, database-driven user interfaces and websites, which will cover an end-to-end process to build a web application. This includes acquiring, installing, and running web servers, database servers, and web applications.

In this course, we will investigate the fields of Consumer Health Informatics and Information Behavior, focusing most heavily on their intersection – Consumer Health Information Behavior. We will explore people’s health-related information needs and whether, how, and why people seek out and use (or do not seek out and use) health information and the types of health information they find useful. We will also cover the important and interrelated topics of information avoidance, health behaviors, health literacy, digital health literacy, doctor-patient communication, and patient-to-patient communication through support groups and online communities. Throughout the course, we will also focus on the important concept of health justice – an ideal state in which everyone has an adequate and equitable capability to be healthy. We will identify populations that frequently experience social injustice and explore the information-related causes and broader consequences of the health inequities members of these populations tend to face. In the final week of the course, we will focus on ways to facilitate health-related information seeking and to promote health justice for all.

Introduction to Health Informatics

Ethical Hacking

People increasingly turn to digital health technologies to support in understanding and managing their personal health and wellness. Although companies have responded with a vast array of apps and other technologies, many of them have been created with little understanding of people’s needs or potential ethical issues. This situation has resulted in a great need for people who know how to study people’s health and wellness needs, what ethical issues are at play, and how to use that knowledge to design improved technologies that meet people’s needs and expectations.

Digital Educational Infrastructures: Practice, Theories, and Evidence of Sociotechnical Systems

Modern technology has provided access to an unprecedented amount of data for the private sector, research initiatives, and even personal consumption at the individual-level. With modern processing capabilities and current data analysis techniques, data scientists are able to scrutinize large and previously un-wieldy datasets and use them to identify significant trends and forecast future patterns. In spite of the importance and near ubiquity of Big Data, individuals with the necessary skills, critical thinking abilities, and professional preparedness remain uncommon.

Computational Journalism

The intelligence process and how to build business advantage by the collection and analysis of the capabilities, vulnerabilities, market positioning and strategic planning of competitors using open source information.

Students will explore the key issues facing policy makers attempting to manage the problem of cybersecurity from its technical foundations to domestic and international policy considerations surrounding governance, privacy, risk management, and operational orchestration. It is designed for students with no background in information technology, and will provide the principles to understand the current debates shaping a rapidly evolving security landscape. Also offered as PLCY388C. Credit only granted for PLCY388C or INST408V.

Special Topics in Information Science; Privacy and Cybersecurity

An exploration of how to extract insights from large-scale datasets. The course will cover the complete analytical funnel from data extraction and cleaning to data analysis and insights interpretation and visualization. The data analysis component will focus on techniques in both supervised and unsupervised learning to extract information from datasets. Topics will include clustering, classification, and regression techniques. Through homework assignments, a project, exams and in-class activities, students will practice working with these techniques and tools to extract relevant information from structured and unstructured data.

Examines approaches to locating, acquiring, manipulating, and disseminating data. Imperfection, biases, and other problems in data are examined, and methods for identifying and correcting such problems are introduced. The course covers other topics such as automated collection of large data sets, and extracting, transforming, and reformatting a variety of data and fle types.

This course focuses on introducing students to the principles, methods, and technologies involved in the digital curation of large cultural data collections. Students will learn these concepts in class lectures, discussions, and participating on project teams in the Digital Curation Innovation Center (DCIC).

Data visualization is the graphical representation of data to aid understanding, and is the key to analyzing big data for fields such as science, engineering, medicine, and the humanities. This undergraduate course is an introduction to data visualization, where you will learn how to design, build, and evaluate visualizations for different types of data, disciplines, and domains.

Discusses human and organizational decision making from a variety of perspectives. Applies different risk assessment and decision making frameworks that are relevant to personal and organization cybersecurity, with a focus on the quantitative Factor Analysis of Information Risk (FAIR) model. Considers monetary, social and societal costs of cybersecurity decisions. Considers a range of questions relating to cybersecurity, from whether to install a game on a smartphone to how to allocate scarce information security resources in an organization.

Individual, cultural, and societal outcomes associated with development of information & communication technologies (ICTs), including pro- and anti-social factors. Unpacking how gender, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, disabilities, and political affiliations affect consumption and production of online experiences. Unpacking how structures of dominance, power and privilege manifest at individual, institutional and cultural levels.

This project-based course will focus on addressing a range of information problems in a variety of contexts and environments, including identifying stakeholders and studying their information needs and behaviors; assessing impacts of information infrastructures, interventions and policies; and analyzing, designing, developing and deploying information systems.

Examines Apollo mission, one of the greatest engineering accomplishments of all time, in which Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. Since the mission, people have asked: if we can land on the moon, why can't we eliminate poverty? Why can't we cure cancer? Why can't we prevent global warming? Asks what were the social, political, financial, scientific, engineering, operational, and human aspects of the Apollo program that came together to make the moon landings possible?

This is a hands-on course in which small groups of students will develop and deploy a web survey, collect and analyze data from actual respondents, and write a report suitable for a client. Lectures and class discussion will focus on the scientific literature in web survey methodology with a focus on practical implications.

Special Topics in Information Science; Decision Making for Cybersecurity

In May 1961, President Kennedy reached into the 21st century and pulled a decade back into the 1960s. Just over eight years later, Neil Armstrong became the first of twelve people to walk on the Moon. This was one of the greatest engineering accomplishments of all time, and a transcendent human experience. This course will draw on both primary and secondary sources to explore the social, political, financial, scientific, engineering, operational and human aspects of the Apollo program that came together to make the Moon landings possible and it will invite students to reflect on the limitations of the Apollo approach that leave us still grasping for solutions to many other complex societal problems.