“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In the classroom, web courses are often still based on techniques that are outdated and considered poor practice in among professionals.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.

Read the rest of the article on AListApart.com

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.

Read the rest of the article on AListApart.com

The proposals in these articles are promising. I hope that these ideas get some traction.  What are your thoughts?

Related articles:

• Elevate Web Design at the University Level (Mark Greenfield)
• University Web Developers discussion of this topic on cuwebd.ning.com

I am personally unlikely to waiver from my support of open source platforms and tools, but I have to admit that this makes I more likely that I’ll give CF a look.  Here’s the post from Campus Technology:

Adobe Makes ColdFusion 8 Free for Students, Educators
9/3/2008
By David Nagel

Adobe has made its ColdFusion 8 Web development platform free for educators and students. The offer is available for all public and private accredited K-12 schools and colleges and universities.

ColdFusion 8 for Education is a full version of Adobe’s development and server platform. This free edition is meant to be used only for instructional purposes and not in production environments.

According to Adobe, “Academic institutions are experiencing increasing demands for students to develop ColdFusion skills earlier in their education to meet the high workforce demand for rich Internet application developers. Through this free offering, faculty can now easily integrate ColdFusion into their curriculum and enable students to advance their Web application learning more quickly and easily.”

ColdFusion 8 for Education is available now. Registration and proof of eligibility for students, faculty, and staff are required. Eligibility includes accredited schools, colleges, and universities in the United States and its territories, academic administration centers and boards of education, research institutions recognized by the United States Department of Education, and some home schools. Further information about eligibility can be found here.

Multiple licenses (up to 30) can be requested through a single registration, and multiple registrations can be used to request more than 30 licenses. Installation support is provided free, but additional support (technical support or developer support) requires registration in a fee-based program. ColdFusion 8 for Education can be accessed here.

Nominations Sought for 2008 Swiggy Awards for Web Excellence

For the second year in a row, the Statewide Internet Group (also known as “SWIG”) is holding its Swiggy Award competition to recognize excellence in state website design.

The “Swiggy” is awarded to the top three websites nominated from within state government, K-12 schools, or higher education.  The purpose of the Swiggy Awards is to recognize state organizations’ efforts in creating and maintaining well-designed, helpful, accessible and easy to use websites for the citizens of West Virginia.

Nominations will be accepted until October 1, 2008.

An award-winning website should be aesthetically pleasing and easy to use. For state and federal organizations, websites must also be accessible – meaning they can be used by people with all types of disabilities. Websites must be nominated by the organization owning the website and should be visible to the public.

The SWIG is a user group of the state Information Technology Council (ITC).  Participation in SWIG is diverse and includes people from across the state responsible for maintaining, developing or coordinating websites at state agencies, in the K-12 school system, or in higher education.

To nominate a website and for more information on the contest, visit http://swig.wv.gov.

Last year, however, I decided to try using what is arguably the most widely used and popular blogging tool to manage my course content online.  I installed WordPress on my personal web hosting account (a relatively inexpensive account that I pay for with a web hosting company).  Installing WordPress is easy, but you don’t have to install it yourself to use it.  But, you don’t even have to use WordPress.  Utilizing a blog for a course is easy to manage and makes delivering content to your students super easy.

You might ask, why not use eCampus instead?  Well, you can, this is just another tool that you might be interested in using. The concept of blogging itself warrants exploration as it has many uses in the classroom.  In using a tool like WordPress, one can get a better feel for how that might work.

WordPress has three basic types of content: posts, pages, and comments.   Posts are best for news items or items that are timestamped.  Posts in WordPress are by default displayed on the main page of most WordPress themes.  Posts are added to the site’s RSS Feed and can be subscribed to.  [You can opt to have a page display as the main page, though.] Pages, on the other hand are best for content that is “timeless” and doesn’t need to be timestamped.  Pages are not part of the RSS feed by default.  Comments are usually tied to posts, but you can have comments on pages too.  Comments also generate an RSS feed.

Ok, so now that the technical explanation is our of the way….

I set up pages for the course syllabus, the class schedule, general project instructions, final project information, and contact information.   For each assignment, I set up posts with detailed instructions and the due date prominently displayed in the post title.  This included tests as well.  I also created a How-to section pertaining to each assignment.  Additionally if something came up during the semester that I needed to explain in more detail, I could post and have it displayed at the top of the page (at the beginning of the feed, if you will).  Now, the real beauty in WordPress is not the ease of use in which all of this can be set up – which (is pretty darn easy), but the ability to forward date (timestamp) the posts.  So I can, in essence, create the entire course at the beginning of the semester and specify on what date and at what time I want the post to appear on the website.  This is especially handy for tests, but it minimizes the risk that the students will visit the first week, completely overwhelmed with information, and not pay as much attention to new information as they need to as the semester goes on.

Once you are finished with the course, you can then go back and reuse the posts for the next semester by simply changing the dates and updating downloads like tests and the syllabus.  This is also a good time to refine any of the posts that may have been confusing to some of the students or you found prompted a bunch of questions.

One thing I have not done in the past is allowed comments.  I am considering allowing that this semester to make the site more collaborative.  Other ideas I am tossing around are:

1. Allowing the students access to blog with updates about their projects.  In my class each student selects an organization (real or fictional) and develops basic public relations materials for it (logo, letterhead, business card, advertisements, brochure, and a newsletter).
2. Adding screencasts about using the software.
3. Asking questions and asking the students to reply in the comments.  Typically I don’t have much time to have discussions in class because so much of it is about how to use the software to create their projects.

I know I am barely scratching the surface in what I can actually do with this platform and to enhance the student experience.  On the other hand I don’t want to complicate it too much and water down the primary objective of the course – to teach the students about desktop publishing in a public relations context.

Regardless, using a blog to manage the timing and delivery of information is a huge help for a busy person like myself.