David warned there would be a heavy reading list. “I’m not sliming you with a bunch of textbooks, so please know I am dead serious about these readings,” he wrote. “Skip or skim at your peril.”

Image David Carr at home in 2008. Credit... Ryan Pfluger for The New York Times

Each of his classes and reading assignments spoke to specific pieces of his vision for the future. “You Are What You Type on” was the title of his Week 3 lecture, “a discussion of how, more and more, the medium is becoming the message.” In Week 5, “New Business Models for Storytelling,” David required the students to read “GE Becomes Legitimate Online News Publisher,” a Digiday article that explored how General Electric was producing its own high-quality news content, known as “native advertising.” A few weeks later, in a class called “Storytelling Innovations,” David, a music nut, assigned Arcade Fire’s “Reflektor,” a trailblazing interactive video that the rock band produced along with Google.

As forward-thinking as David was, he also revered great journalism in the traditional sense. Sprinkled throughout the course list are pieces that have nothing to do with content management systems or multimedia packaging. He asked his students to read, before the semester began, Ta-Nehisi Coates’s “The Case for Reparations,” the provocative essay published last year in The Atlantic describing how blacks should be financially compensated for having been handicapped throughout American history. For the second week, he assigned “Consider the Lobster,” David Foster Wallace’s dispatch from the Maine Lobster Festival that considered whether it was “all right to boil a sentient creature alive just for our gustatory pleasure.”

And as an exceptional writer with a unique voice, David did not forsake the opportunity to share those gifts. In a class called “Voice Lessons,” he sought to teach students “how to quit sounding like everyone else and begin sounding like ... yourself.”

“From asking me about my personal experiences and things that had happened in my life, he would give me advice specifically geared to me,” said Prim Chuwiruch, 24, who is originally from Thailand and was a graduate student in David’s first class. “He would say, ‘These are things that you have that no one else does, and you should channel that.’ ”

In the curriculum, David said: “Who you are and what you have been through should give you a prism on life that belongs to you only. We will talk about the uses and abuses of a writer’s voice, how to express yourself in copy without using the ‘I’ word and why ending stories with a quote from someone else is often the coward’s way out.”