Last week A List Apart, an online magazine for professionals in the web industry, has two excellent articles about the challenges in getting colleges and universities nationwide offer curriculum relevant in Web development and design. Higher education is simply not meeting the needs of the industry. Mark Greenfield, director of the Office of Web Services at the University of Buffalo posted on his blog Friday about this article and topic:
“I’ve been thinking about this issue for over a decade. I’ve hired numerous people over the years and not one gained the skills they need from formal education. I’ve watched members of my staff get graduate degrees and listened to them express their complete frustration over how inadequate and inappropriate the curriculum was. I’ve taught graduate level classes and as an instructor, found the experience to be very frustrating.”
Being a web professional myself, I have also have experienced this first hand. I graduated in 1998 at a time when the industry was just starting, so it wasn’t uncommon for web professionals to have little formal training. The sad thing is, that a decade later, there is still not an actual program of study dedicated to this field. It typically gets relegated to either computer science, engineering, graphic design, journalism, or maybe communication studies. Web professionals know that if you studied only one of those fields, you would not be able to hold your own in the web industry.
This fundamental misunderstanding of what it means to be a web professional extends to the job market. Often organizations devalue or simply do not comprehend web development. Web professionals frequently find themselves under marketing or information technology both of which have different agendas. Web development has evolved to the point, however, that it should to be its own department/unit/team, etc. that practices the integration of communication, design, and function required in this field. Organizations also need to understand that the Web is a vital piece of their business strategy and is a cost of doing business, not an afterthought and certainly not something to be handed off to non-professionals to manage (read: students).
In the classroom, web courses are often still based on techniques that are outdated and considered poor practice in among professionals. In their defense, professors teaching the classes aren’t always provided the tools, budget, and time to keep up with current design practices. In the web world, conferences, blogs, and networking serve as surrogate degree granting programs for web professionals. Instructors need to be a part of that as well.
So back I come to the fundamental problem. Higher education does not “get” web design and development.
That said Leslie Jensen-Inman has some great ideas in her article on how higher education can change AND how web professionals can help.
From AListApart.com
Elevate Web Design at the University Level
By Leslie Jensen-Inman
Let’s face it. Technology moves fast; academia doesn’t. So how should educators teach web design and development—subjects that change constantly? How should educators prepare students for real-world expectations? How do educators stay up-to-date? And how do web professionals help educators to create graduates who fit in and actually know what they’re doing?
Right now, web education is out of date and fragmented. There are good people working hard to change this, but because of the structure of higher education, it will take time. So while sweeping change can’t happen today, let’s challenge ourselves to do what we can. Today, let’s begin to make positive, sustainable change to build a foundation for the future.
Define the problem
Many people casually, but often passionately, complain about the state of web education. I’ve heard these complaints at conferences, over dinner, and have read them online—especially when someone tries to hire a recent graduate as a web designer or developer.
About a year ago, I embarked on a journey to discover where we are in web education and where we need to go.
I interviewed thirty-two web design and development leaders. Each of them expressed interest in the formal education of the next generation of web professionals. Most emphasized a challenge common to higher education: technology moves too fast for curriculum to keep up with it.
As James Archer of Forty Agency stated,
The culture of large educational institutions has, in my experience, consistently proven itself unable to cope with the demands of such a varied and fast-moving industry. I know many good people are trying, but I’ve yet to see anyone come out of a university program knowing what they’d need to know in order for us to hire them.
The other article, Brighter Horizons for Web Education, talks about the curriculum problem and what the web industry is doing to help solve it. This is an exciting development and I hope that WVU takes a serious look at this initiative.
The Web Standards Project and others have been working on curriculum frameworks to better educate budding web professionals.
from AListApart.com
in Brighter Horizons for Web Education
The WaSP Curriculum Framework
In our ongoing fight to establish wide adoption of standards in our profession, those of us involved in The Web Standards Project have begun trying to tackle the education issue. Industry experts and veteran educators on the WaSP Education Task Force are currently working to develop the WaSP Curriculum Framework (WCF), a modular curriculum that can be used to improve existing curricula or serve as the foundation for emerging programs. (Disclosure: I’m a member of The Web Standards Project, an educator, and the project lead of the WaSP Curriculum Framework.)
The WCF will be released in March of 2009 as a living curriculum that will adapt to changes in the industry so that schools using it can ensure their students are learning the concepts that are relevant to their field of study.
The WCF’s first release will contain approximately 14 courses divided into six learning tracks:
- Foundations
- Front-end Development
- Design
- Server-side Development
- User Science
- Professional Practice
Each course in the WCF will contain a list of learning competencies that students must master to pass the course, assignments with assessment rubrics to help educators consistently evaluate student progress, lists of recommended textbooks and readings, exam questions, and other relevant teaching and learning resources.
The WCF is designed to accommodate new courses, and certain elements of existing courses can be adapted to meet the needs of a particular school or region. The WCF will also include a template that helps educators create their own short lesson plans or “learning modules,” thus giving educators the freedom to tailor courses to their own teaching approach while staying true to the courses’ core learning competencies. Educators who have had success in the classroom with their learning modules can submit them to the WCF team for review and potential publication so that other educators can benefit. All the content in the WCF will be released under an open Creative Commons license.
In addition to HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and accessibility courses, the WCF will also include courses that teach students the basic principles of design and usability, as well as how to speak about their work and how to work in teams. It will take some time for us to do justice to all facets of our craft, but it’s our hope that the initial courses released will teach the practices at the core of our industry.
The proposals in these articles are promising. I hope that these ideas get some traction. What are your thoughts?
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Are you offering any classes on web marketing / promotion?
Very good information on this class, thank you.
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i’m interested on both the article. it is true as i am teaching web design. the module outline that was created from our partner university is not to the industry standard and i’m quite frustrated. i’m planning to do a research on this topic