ITAS 191 — Designing a Secure Web User Experience
Instructor: David Croft — croftd@itas.ca — Building 180, room 224
Class: Tuesdays 9:00 – 2:00, Building 180 room 332. First class Tuesday 15 September. No class Tuesday 13 October (VIU runs the Monday schedule that day) and no class Tuesday 10 November (study days). Portfolio launch — final demos — Tuesday 15 December.
Calendar description (ITAS 191, 4 credits): Students learn the art and practice of designing effective and impactful web sites and applications using HTML and CSS. This course focuses on the designing the User Interface and User Experience for applications and how to prevent common security vulnerabilities with web authoring. (2:0:3)
Hands-on web design for the age of AI: hand-authored HTML and CSS, design fundamentals and UI/UX patterns, accessibility and SEO, JavaScript for behaviour, 3D content with Three.js — and a personal site, built by hand from week 1 and live on the internet from mid-term, that grows into your final portfolio. Labs are marked in person: you demo your work and explain your choices.
- Instructor: Dave Croft
ITAS 170 — IT Tools and Techniques
Instructor: David Croft — croftd@itas.ca — Building 180, room 224
Class: Mondays 9:00 – 2:00, Building 180 room 332. First class Monday 14 September. Thanksgiving Monday 12 October: no class, but Tuesday 13 October runs the Monday schedule — we meet. No class Monday 9 November (study days). Launch day — final project presentations — Monday 14 December.
Calendar description (ITAS 170, 4 credits): This course focuses on the various tools that are used by people working in IT. This includes security techniques, development environments, remote access (SSH), Source Code Management (git), virtualization and containers, web server configuration and more. Students are introduced to effective prompt engineering to learn to effectively learn AI agents in a secure and productive manner. (2:0:3)
How the course runs: every week you drive a real tool from a terminal — the shell, git and SSH, an AI assistant and a local model, containers and a web server, GPUs — and keep a session log of what you asked, what came back and what you verified. Labs are marked in person: you demo your work and explain your choices. The term ends with one project the whole class builds and deploys together.
- Instructor: Dave Croft