IMD Current-State Curriculum Map

Faculty Working Draft
Prepared September 2026

Purpose

This document provides a provisional map of the current Immersive Media Design curriculum, including the program's shared course sequence, track-specific areas of depth, major competencies, and points of curricular continuity. It is intended to establish a common evidence base for faculty discussion of specializations, project development across courses, and the relationship among IMDM290, IMDM390, and Senior Capstone.

The organizing premise is:

Students should progressively build an identity, body of work, and area of expertise across the curriculum rather than encountering each course as an independent experience.

The goal is not to eliminate experimentation or require students to carry a single project through the entire program. The goal is to make depth possible by creating intentional opportunities for students to reuse, extend, remix, recontextualize, or professionalize prior work.

Status and Method

This is a current-state map, not a curriculum proposal. It draws from the published IMD degree requirements, official course descriptions, program learning outcomes, and portfolio requirements available in September 2026.

The map distinguishes between two kinds of evidence:

1. Published curriculum: what the catalog and program materials formally require or describe.
2. Enacted curriculum: what faculty teach, what students make, which facilities they use, and how consistently those experiences occur across sections and semesters.

The published curriculum can establish the program's formal structure. Faculty review is still needed to verify the enacted curriculum. Accordingly, the competency ratings below are provisional and should not be treated as official course designations.

Competency Scale

1. Current Curriculum Structure

IMD currently combines a shared immersive-media sequence with two distinct degree pathways:

• The Computing B.S. develops technical depth through the Computer Science core, upper-level computing electives, graphics programming, and IMDM327.
• The Emerging Creatives B.A. develops artistic and conceptual depth through Studio Art foundations, digital-media courses, creative coding, and IMDM350.
• Both tracks share the central IMDM studio and Capstone sequence.

Shared IMDM Spine

Computing B.S. Depth

Emerging Creatives B.A. Depth

2. Provisional Competency Map

The following matrix maps major program competencies to the places where they appear most visibly in the published curriculum. It should be read as a starting point for faculty validation rather than a final assessment.

3. Existing Areas of Depth

Computing and Software

The Computing B.S. already provides a substantial technical sequence. Students complete the core programming, systems, discrete structures, programming languages, and algorithms courses before selecting upper-level technical work. Relevant options include game programming, computer graphics, human-computer interaction, artificial intelligence, machine learning, deep learning, computer vision, and data visualization.

This is a genuine area of curricular depth, although not all technical areas are equally accessible or visible as IMD pathways.

Studio and Digital Creative Practice

The Emerging Creatives B.A. provides a similarly substantial art and design sequence. Students progress through 2D and 3D foundations, drawing, digital-art and design processes, intermediate digital media, and advanced digital-media electives.

This sequence provides meaningful artistic depth, particularly in visual, spatial, material, and digital practice.

Collaborative Immersive Production

Collaborative production is the strongest shared IMD competency. IMDM101 introduces team-based making; IMDM290 emphasizes collaborative production and asset management; IMDM390 advances toward larger experiential work involving research, production, critique, display, and documentation; and Capstone culminates in a substantial public project.

This shared sequence is a defining feature of the program and a logical foundation for future specializations.

Latent and Emerging Specializations

The curriculum also contains substantial pieces of several possible specializations, but these are not consistently organized as visible student pathways:

• Game design and development
• Extended reality and spatial computing
• Artificial intelligence and machine learning
• Interaction design and HCI
• Physical computing and tangible media
• 3D art, animation, and technical art
• Sound and spatial audio
• Creative research and critical digital practice

The principal current-state issue is not necessarily absence. In several cases, the issue is that existing courses, projects, facilities, and faculty expertise are distributed across tracks and departments without an explicit progression that students can readily identify and follow.

4. Curricular Continuity

Published Sequence

The shared curriculum suggests a developmental progression:

IMDM101 → IMDM227 → IMDM290 → IMDM390 → Senior Capstone

The formal prerequisite structure, however, does not fully encode that sequence:

• IMDM290 requires IMDM227 and ARTT255.
• IMDM390 requires IMDM290.
• IMDM490 requires IMDM290, but not IMDM390.
• IMDM491 requires IMDM490.

The formal structure therefore establishes two related chains:

IMDM227 → IMDM290 → IMDM390

and

IMDM290 → IMDM490 → IMDM491

It does not formally establish IMDM390 as the required bridge between Collaborative Studio I and Senior Capstone.

Structural Question

If IMDM290 is intended to build toward IMDM390, and IMDM390 is intended to prepare students for Capstone, the current prerequisite structure does not fully reinforce that expectation. This produces a central question for faculty review:

Should IMDM390 function as an explicit curricular bridge between Collaborative Studio I and Senior Capstone, and what competencies, artifacts, or planning documents should students carry across each transition?

The Project Journey

The discontinuous model can be summarized as:

Course → Project → Grade → Abandoned Project → Next Course → New Project

A stronger continuity model would make room for:

Foundation → Prototype → Development → Refinement → Portfolio / Capstone

This model does not require every student to continue the same project. It creates permission and infrastructure for promising work to continue when doing so supports new learning. A project might be extended technically, reframed conceptually, redesigned for a new audience, expanded through collaboration, documented professionally, or developed into a larger public work.

The governing principle should be:

New learning, not mandatory project novelty.

5. Current-State Cases Relevant to Specialization

Game Design

Game design is already present in the curriculum, but its components are disconnected.

• Technical depth: CMSC425 covers game programming and design, hardware and systems, modeling, physics, game AI, networking, rendering, animation, sound, and implementation of a working game.
• Critical context: IMDM350 addresses game culture within a broader examination of digital culture, networks, AR/VR, AI, ethics, and social impact.
• Production environment: IMDM290, IMDM390, special topics, independent study, and Capstone can support game projects.
• Complementary practices: visual design, 3D, sound, interaction, creative coding, and collaborative production already exist elsewhere in the curriculum.

The current state is therefore not "no game design." It is a set of technical, critical, artistic, and production components that have not yet been organized into a coherent and visible pathway.

Artificial Intelligence

AI follows a similar pattern.

• IMDM350 provides critical, cultural, social, political, environmental, and ethical context for AI and machine learning.
• The Computing B.S. can access technical depth through courses such as CMSC421, CMSC422, CMSC472, computer vision, robotics, and related electives.
• Special topics and individual projects can provide creative experimentation.
• Demonstration is generally project-dependent rather than guaranteed through a shared IMD sequence.

AI currently exists as distributed expertise rather than a coherent IMD progression.

6. Portfolio, Professional Practice, and Facilities

Portfolio Development

Both tracks submit a portfolio, typically in the third semester while taking IMDM227. The portfolio is expected to show self-direction, technical and creative development, project documentation, and a developing sense of artistic or professional identity. Students may include class projects, personal work, prototypes, sketches, storyboards, and works in progress.

Explicit portfolio-related work then becomes less visible in the published middle curriculum. IMDM390 includes communication, display, and documentation; IMDM491 culminates in public exhibition, marketing, public relations, and promotion.

The published structure therefore appears as:

Early portfolio gate → less explicit middle sequence → documentation → public exhibition and promotion

rather than a fully articulated progression of:

Portfolio introduction → documentation habits → iterative refinement → professional portfolio → public presentation

This is relevant to specialization because students need to see their work accumulating into a coherent body of practice.

Professional Practice

Professional practice is most visible near the end of the curriculum through production planning, exhibition, documentation, promotion, and public presentation. Earlier and middle-stage professional practices, such as role identification, career research, collaborative expectations, budgeting, client work, intellectual property, entrepreneurship, and sustained portfolio development, are less explicit in published course descriptions.

Specialized Facilities

The program identifies substantial facilities, including a large projection wall, prototyping makerspace, motion capture, imaging and 3D scanning, sound, design, and XR/VR labs. The public curriculum does not establish which students are guaranteed meaningful experience with which facilities, at what stage, or at what level of independence.

Facilities should therefore be mapped using three columns:

This internal audit would distinguish available resources from curricular access.

7. Principal Findings

1. IMD already contains substantial depth. Computing, studio and digital art, and collaborative immersive production are well established.
2. Depth is distributed unevenly across the two tracks. The B.S. supplies strong technical scaffolding, while the B.A. supplies strong artistic and conceptual scaffolding.
3. Several potential specializations already exist in partial form. Games, XR, AI, interaction design, 3D, sound, and physical computing have meaningful curricular components, but their sequences are not always explicit.
4. The program's strongest shared identity is collaborative immersive production. This provides a common spine onto which specializations can be built.
5. The formal curriculum does not require IMDM390 before Capstone. This weakens the intended progression from IMDM290 through IMDM390 into IMDM490 and IMDM491.
6. Portfolio development is visible early and late, but less explicit in the middle. Students have an early portfolio review and a culminating public presentation, but the intervening developmental sequence is not clearly articulated.
7. Professional practice is late-loaded. It is most explicit in Capstone rather than distributed across the curriculum.
8. Facilities are a program strength, but curricular access is difficult to determine from public materials. Internal validation is needed to distinguish availability, intended use, and guaranteed student experience.
9. The central challenge is curricular legibility and continuity. Students may be able to assemble depth, but they often must discover and connect the pieces themselves.

8. Faculty Validation Process

The next step should be a short internal audit of required courses and major electives. For each course, faculty should identify:

1. The competencies introduced, practiced, advanced, or demonstrated.
2. The major assignments and student artifacts that provide evidence.
3. The skills students are expected to bring into the course.
4. The skills, documents, or projects students leave with.
5. The courses or experiences that intentionally build on those outcomes.
6. Whether students may reuse, extend, remix, or recontextualize earlier work.
7. Which facilities, technologies, and equipment students are guaranteed to use.
8. Whether students produce portfolio-ready documentation.
9. Which professional roles, practices, or career contexts are introduced.
10. Where instructors see unnecessary repetition, missing preparation, or an abrupt jump in expectations.

Recommended Internal Mapping Template

The resulting internal map should be compared with the published map in this document. Differences among the catalog, faculty intention, and student experience are findings rather than errors. They can identify where coordination, course revision, advising, staffing, or resource investment is needed.

9. Working Conclusion

The current IMD curriculum is not without specialization. It contains several latent specializations that students often have to discover and assemble for themselves.

The clearest established areas are:

• Computing and software, centered in the Computing B.S.
• Studio and digital creative practice, centered in the Emerging Creatives B.A.
• Collaborative immersive production, centered in the shared IMDM sequence.

Around these are less formally scaffolded areas, including game design, XR, AI, sound, physical computing, interaction design, 3D, and creative research.

The principal opportunity is to make existing trajectories more intentional, visible, and continuous. The curriculum contains depth, but it does not always provide a clear mechanism through which students progressively transform that depth into an identity, a sustained body of work, and an area of expertise.

Sources

• University of Maryland Undergraduate Catalog: Immersive Media Design Major
• University of Maryland Undergraduate Catalog: IMDM Course Descriptions
• University of Maryland Undergraduate Catalog: CMSC Course Descriptions
• Immersive Media Design: Degree Programs
• Immersive Media Design: Portfolio Submission