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Right now, web education is out of date and fragmented.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#section2
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.
Rip off the bandage#section3
“Ouch!” That’s what I thought when I read through the interviews. Many comments were similar. I know educators who do what they can to stay afloat teaching web topics. Most of these educators don’t have the resources to do what needs to be done.
I understand these frustrations. We’re not preparing students and that has a lot to do with the educational bureaucracy and institutions. However, educators should have help shouldering the burden. In partnership, web educators and web professionals can be pioneers for change.
Connect people#section4
We need to connect educators and practicing professionals through web and educational conferences. We need to encourage conversation between local web professionals and higher educational institutions.
Aarron Walter, the lead user experience designer for MailChimp, advised that,
Departments need to create a culture of learning that requires faculty to stay abreast of new topics. Schools should make it a priority to send faculty to conferences and training programs to ensure they’re not falling behind.
Yes, this has to happen. Web professionals attend web conferences to keep up-to-date with trends and technologies and to create/maintain a professional network. Travel and event cost is usually a business expense. It is often paid for by the employer or is a tax write-off for business owners or freelancers. Educators often do not have these resources; and, many do not have any budget for travel. This makes it extremely difficult for educators to afford to attend conferences and workshops.
Web conference and workshop organizers can be part of the solution by offering deeply discounted rates to educators. By making these events more affordable, organizers send the message that educators are welcome.
Businesses can be another part of the solution. Businesses can reach out to local educators and offer to sponsor their trip or part of their trip to a web conference or workshop. This can be great publicity for both the business and the university and help businesses to participate in producing viable job candidates.
Web design and development professionals need to speak to classes and offer site visits to their businesses to connect educators and students with full-time web designers and developers. Real-world experience is essential, and real-world internships must be integrated into the curriculum to prepare students to work with real clients who have real expectations, deadlines, and budgets.
Greg Storey, Principal of Airbag Industries, stated,
I find that students are used to having more time to complete projects than is required in business. It would be handy if students were taken through a series of real-world exercises and projects that made them studio-ready as soon as that diploma hits their hand.
Connections between higher education and business have to be created, nurtured, and sustained. These relationships support the growth of educational institutions and the community’s desire to retain recent graduates who might otherwise leave the community. Partnering colleges and universities with local companies that provide career paths in web design and development allows recent graduates to see the community as a viable place to further their professional interests.
I know that you are sitting there, reading this, and thinking to yourself, “Yes, this is what needs to happen.” And I know you’re wondering to yourself, “What can I do to get involved?”
Here’s how you can make a difference and start changing the state of web education, today.
When you drive, bike, or scooter to work each morning, do you pass a university? If so, contact the web educator at the university and see what you can do to help connect the school to you, your company, and your professional organizations. Does the educator need/want a guest lecturer to come to class and speak on your area of expertise? Yes, you are an expert on something and you should share your expertise with educators and their students.
Initiate contact with a web educator. The minimal time and effort that goes into making an introduction and spending an hour with a class greatly influences educators and students. The positive influence you’ll get from speaking with students and helping them achieve their goals might surprise you. It’s a feeling you’ll want to capture in a bottle to replenish yourself on days when clients are acting awful, your server is down, and you’ve spilled coffee on your laptop. When everything goes wrong in the world, you’ll know that you’ve done something right; you’ve given your time and energy to help shape the future of web education.
Embrace change#section5
Although staying up-to-date is essential, the ever-changing state of technology makes it challenging for educators to stay current. As web designer Rob Weychert, said,
Hire faculty that are motivated to maintain their own continuing self-education (just as many of us in the work force do, largely via the blogosphere), and have schools fund it whenever possible (conferences, workshops, seminars, etc.). I hear too many horror stories about schools teaching sorely outdated practices. As much as I’m sure budget constraints are a problem, I can’t get my head around the idea of hiring professors who lack the curiosity to keep up with what’s going on in the web design/development world. It moves too fast. Hire people willing to keep up with it.
Teaching current technologies is critical. Equally critical is teaching that these technologies will change and that, for students to stay competitive in the real world, they will have to change with these technologies. To give students a well-rounded education, fundamentals and theory must be taught, as well. Although technology is vital to web design and web development, specific technologies are not as important as teaching “why” something should be done. As web designer Dan Rubin stated,
…the thought process involved is the most important thing for me. I like to see that each problem is approached in a unique way that’s appropriate to the given problem. I don’t really care how it’s approached, just that a degree of thought has been applied.
Let go#section6
We also need to let go of the idea that professors in these disciplines must hold a master’s degree. The reality is that many web professionals are self-taught. A person with solid experience and a proven track record should be considered an appropriate candidate to teach web design and development in higher education. Jeff Croft, web designer and developer at Blue Flavor, mentioned that he would be interested in teaching at the university level:
Hire instructors that are relevant. By and large, educational institutions are not doing this…I was contacted by a large university about teaching web design and was quite interested. Then they found out I had no graduate-level degree. So instead, they hired a retired Java programmer to teach, “web design.” Huh?
Most of the relevant folks in the industry today don’t have graduate-level degrees in web design or development. Why? Because web design and development programs didn’t exist when we came through school. Most of us stopped going to school as soon as we realized the schools weren’t teaching us anything relevant.
To be more relevant, colleges and universities are going to have to get over their accreditation standards and hire the people doing great work on the web today to teach. That’s really the only way…Likewise, they can’t expect the same folks that have been teaching graphic design for 30 years to really be competent web design teachers. They need new blood—people that really understand this stuff and are passionate about it.
Get organized#section7
Professional organizations afford the most efficient opportunity to set a framework for the collaborative process. Several organizations such as The Web Standards Project (WaSP) and the World Organization of Webmasters (WOW) are pioneers in this effort. The WaSP Education Task Force is developing a web standards-based curriculum called the WaSP Curriculum Framework. Opera has been developing and publishing curriculum. Read Brighter Horizons for Web Education to get more information on these endeavors. It’s really exciting to see so many people making positive change in web education. Combined, these groups can create curriculum that supports the educational needs of our students.
Although, at this time, many colleges and universities are not producing the type of web professionals we need in web design and development, thoughtful effort from passionate people can change this. We have the opportunity to combine our resources and professional networks to champion the ideals of web standards-based curricula that will prepare our students for meaningful careers in web design and development.
Get depressed, get over it, and get involved#section8
As an educator, I want to see my students succeed. I want to give them every opportunity to graduate with skills that allow them to have fulfilling careers—careers where they contribute to the field. Although, universally this is not happening now, I challenge us all to change our thinking, to get over being depressed, and to move beyond complaining.
Here are three things you can do today to make a difference in web education:
- connect with a university,
- sponsor an educator, and
- volunteer your time.
Let’s collaborate to create learning environments that students need. Seize this opportunity to create the education that students ought to have. We can only improve on the situation, right? So let’s do it. Let’s all decide, today, right now, that we are going to help change web education for the next generation of web professionals.
Bucky Fuller said, “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”
I believe, but am unable to document, that Peter Abelard argued (nearly 900 years ago!) that the foundation of education was discourse while the foundation of faith was lecture. He said this as a means of differentiating the role of the university from the role of the church. But if you look at what goes on in many university classrooms today, what do you see? Is it open, omni-direction discussion and debate (discourse)? Or is it a one-way “sermon” of “facts” based on the assumed authority of the lecturer? I’ve experienced a good deal of both. My learning style may bias my outlook, but I’ve always learned much more from the discourse method than the lecture method.
But what do we see when we look at communication on the internet? What happens a hundred times a minute on Twitter? I think it’s much closer to the discourse model and therefor, for me at least, an effective medium for learning. The only downfall could be the utter lack of authoritative voice built into the medium. But there’s a reason the author’s comments get a special background color in these discussion threads. With forethought and critical thinking, we’re much more easily able to address the shortcomings in the medium we spend our days building than we are to affect a sea change in education.
I honestly believe we’re sitting on the tools, *right now*, to build a better model. And the best part is these are tools we’ve built ourselves.
I would count all the things discussed in the article among those tools. And there will be those working in academia who “get it”. The students lucky enough to spend a few months or a few years under their guidance will no doubt benefit greatly. But before such practices can become the norm, the number of these people actively working in academia has to reach some kind of critical mass. I don’t expect that to happen until most of the academics who currently get it have “Emeritus” after their names.
@#51 In which case, maybe this discussion should be less about how universities should better their education, and more about how we can get students to collaborate with these tools and with the real world more.
Should we have to hit the ground running, with a knowledge of where to turn to for help? And the other issue is, where can you consistently you find good, reliable help? There are mailing lists, forums, blogs, but the answer isn’t so obvious for anyone new to the web design community (or any new field, for that matter). As “Derek brought up”:(http://www.alistapart.com/comments/elevatewebdesignattheuniversitylevel?page=6#51 what we need most is authoritative voices, but the kind with credibility. Fortunately, people on the Internet are usually kind enough to go out of their way “to point out when someone is wrong”:http://xkcd.com/386/ so maybe this “model” works.
I was really happy to see this article appear in my RSS feed because as a web instructor I empathize with every word.
I’ve been teaching at the Art Institute in Vancouver for three years and so far I had been lucky enough to be dealing with a system where the course construction was entirely in the hands of the instructors. This gave me the opportunity to go through the current lesson plans and remove irrelevant, out of date info – which there was a lot of – and really begin to revamp the curriculum to start fitting the actually industry standards. Before I began teaching the school didn’t even offer a Javascript class.
Currently the school is attempting to move all the programs to degree granting (in Canada we only offer diplomas) and as an effect of this are stating that all faculty will be required to have Masters degrees. This has become an issue with the web program because none of the faculty have Bachelors degrees, let alone Masters, since there are no degree programs that offer web design and programming. The feeling is “get your Masters or get out”.
Since the best instructors are also those who continue to work in the industry the time and money required to get that Masters is just not worth it. Instructors are unsure of their continuation as educators. I am afraid that with the lack of these instructors the education level will quickly spiral downward and possibly revert to its outdated ways.
This article really opened my eyes that my co-workers and I aren’t the only ones feeling the stress of the education politics. I really hope that people heed these words and change begins to happen.
This article couldn’t have come at a better time.
I think there are plenty of students out there that are yearning for the skills you describe. I know some teachers that are struggling to add up-to-the-moment Web design classes at local institutions, and we need to reconsider the Master’s degree hurdle for teaching higher education. Many of the smartest people I’ve met in this industry have advanced degrees from the school of hard knocks and client deadlines.
A good place to start sharing your skills? Take a look at your local community college first, as opposed to trying to become an adjunct instructor at a four-year school. I spoke with my local community college and was able to start teaching this quarter a “class for working designers”:http://www.80works.com/ to start bridging the skills gap that invariably rears its head when they start work at a design agency.
Could we do the same sort of thing for purely Web design/development?
Inspired by this discussion, I “wrote”:http://wutworks.blogspot.com/2009/01/getting-myself-edumacated-about-web.html about my experience in a web development class this semester—including slides of what my prof. calls good web design… its amazing.
From the post: A successful web development course should not just teach stuff (whether past or current) because what we learn now will be obsolete in a few years. In addition to teaching the up-to-date knowledge, it should also infuse the students with a passion to immerse themselves in the industry: read the blogs, check out the new technology, get on Twitter and ask questions… but most importantly, build a lot of websites. If you’ve got an idea for a cool web app, just try building it. Learn as you go along. Unless you have gotten your hands dirty, you won’t have the passion to learn more.
Interesting. I was just having a conversation about the disaster that is our education system this weekend. It was a long conversation and for the sake of brevity I’ll try to make the point fast.
The old adage “those who can’t do, teach” has a lot of truth to it, if only in the sense that the vast majority of people who can “do” have no inclination to go through the rigors of becoming a teacher only to earn less than they do already.
Put it this way: I learn far more in two days at AEA each year than I could possibly learn from a decent classroom professor in two weeks, simply because of the variety of teachers all presenting their most relevant material.
I imagine a future where anybody can create virtual course content and be paid for doing it well. Why limit teaching to teachers? Let everyone create courses and upload them for consumption. The same brick and mortar institutions of today will become a place where we have the ability to enroll in the most effective lectures given by the brightest minds in each and every industry. Why should students be stuck learning math from a low-quality local teacher if the most effective lectures in the world can be made available?
Obviously it would all take some sorting out, and I in no way mean to offend today’s educators, but the open source community has proved it’s abilities in so many other realms. Why can’t we find a way to apply it to education?
I think it’s unfortunate that there is a belief that a culture of self-education in the education system. Everything one needs to keep abreast is out there for free on that series of tubes. I don’t see why those in education can’t keep up with the latest in the same way that the rest of the applied professionals in the industry to it. In my professional career, I’ve given up on formal training in the arena of web and technology because it’s so hit-and-miss. But I feel that I’ve stayed up-to-date by simply keeping up with blogs, etc. Why should educators not invest the same amount of time in such things? Isn’t a large part of teaching in higher education supposed to be research?
…err, I mean: “I think it’s unfortunate that there is a belief that a culture of self-education in the education system has to be costly.
As someone who just graduated from an $30,000/year institution who falls victim to the problems described in this article, I agree and can unfortunately relate to a lot of this. The first job interview that I had, I asked the interviewer why they wanted me to be able to create tableless layouts. I honestly believed that THEY were the ones in need of some updating in their web knowledge. That was about a year ago. The knowledge that I have gained in web design and development in the past year (self-taught, and with the help of those I work with) cannot even be compared to what little and poor knowledge I gained in the 4 years of college.
Web technology only changes fast in detail. The main principle — text based HTML to gain structure — has never changed. HTML 4.01 is around for ages and HTML 5 will take years before really relevant. Some goes for CSS and JavaScript.
The main problem is teachers not having any contact with professional web designers. They taught Java or C++ a decade ago and decide to just “do the web”. With this approach, they bypass the web as an expert environment having it’s own use, quirks and guidelines. They don’t understand HTML because they don’t know its origin. As a result, semantics, maintainability and compatibility are ignored.
I myself teach web design at a University of Applied Science in the Netherlands. Over here we have several bachelor degrees dealing with web design. But none of them focus on just web design. They focus on multimedia in general arguing web design is too narrow for adolescents at bachelor level. I think they have a point.
Another idea is bringing teachers together to learn about the view on web design of their colleagues and curricula at other universities. In the Netherlands, we are organizing such a meeting with lectures from people professionally involved in web design and web standards.
There definitely needs to be a change. It wouldn’t hurt to have people with field experience and a college degree.
When I look back at the only class I ever took on web design, the only thing the teacher knew was the books she had us reading (Lynda.com books) since she went over them herself prior to teaching the class. She had no relevant field experience, just the credentials to teach.
I absolutely agree. Until recently, I moderated a forum for beginning web designers and hobbyists. I also know a few college students taking courses in web design & development right now. The self-educated designers and hobbyists, without exception, always understand standards and best-practices far better than the students do. Their designs are more attractive and modern and their code is cleaner and better formatted. They also know a wider variety of tags and css instructions and use them more appropriately and effectively.
Because of this, I am of the opinion that classroom educations in web development in the current state of things are hurting the students more than they are helping. Not only is the curriculum circa 1998, the instructors themselves are hopelessly lacking in knowledge and talent. I’ve often been directed to the sites they put together as examples for student assignments and frankly they’re shameful in all regards and rarely work outside IE6.
The biggest barriers in my opinion aren’t the institutions; they are the instructor’s own arrogance. For that reason it can be difficult to communicate with many of them. I’ve got a few people in trouble after correcting bad syntax, encouraging them to use CSS for layouts, or techniques compatible with multiple browsers. Instructors mark them down, tell them they’ve done it “wrong” and that it’s not the way it’s done “in the real world” (which apparently to them exists entirely before the turn of the century).
I guess I could continue to rant indefinitely. Thank you for the article, I’ll certainly try out some of your suggestions!
I did a degree in Computer Science and I have a good background in development work. I did an elective from the multimedia dept that covered web based development. During the course of the unit, I found that all of the designers didnt have a clue about even basic stuff like HTML and JavaScript and when it came down to doing the workshops, I spent more time helping the instructors and other students more than I was spending on doing my course work.
Since I graduated in 2000, I have worked in the web industry doing primarily ASP development with some PHP and Perl thrown in as well. Some designers that I have come across have a good understanding of hand-coding HTML and doing some basic JavaScript and a couple of them have even managed to bridge the divide and can write server side code.
I would be very interested in seeing Web Design/Development taught at a tertiary level with branches for the two different streams where a student, after completing the first couple of units where they learn about the syntax of HTML and the DOM and learn how to hand-code HTML rather than having to depend on a WYSIWYG editor.
From there, the students can select the stream that they want to traverse and can do some crossover units as electives.
There is nothing more annoying than working with a designer and asking them to find a bug in the HTML source code and they have never even looked at it before.
I posted this in response to Aarron’s article. Here it is again….
As this debates rages across the net — perhaps it would be worthwhile to step back and look at the role of education in the context of the needs of the industry.
At the Art Institute of Atlanta, we continue to develop our curriculum with inputs from industry professionals. Our courses do address contemporary trends, technologies and approaches. Further, our faculty are practicing industry professionals (freelance and full-time) and bring their real-world experiences into the classroom.
However, we, as educators, need to do more than just stay current with the needs of the industry. It is important that we help our students learn to learn. They need to be able to solve problems, think critically and creatively, step back and see the big picture, learn from other media, visualize the future for the industry and develop an interest in breaking boundaries and taking chances.
Like any other field, some academic programs get it, others do not. The support and involvement of industry professionals is important in achieving the optimal mix of concepts, technology, problem solving, etc., that make a good curriculum.
To all the industry folks who are complaining about the state of education, please go teach a course at an academic institute near you. After all, getting a good curriculum definition is the first step. Bringing it into the classroom and making learning come alive, is the next challenge.
Congratulations to our author for “getting some press”:http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/article/3582/colleges-get-poor-grades-on-teaching-web-skills in the Chronicle of Higher Education. The article there doesn’t really add anything new for this audience, but among academics (and possibly more importantly among administrative types) it should result in some high visibility of these issues. It’s a major indicator that higher ed might actually be ready to start paying attention to us. Great work Leslie!
Also, I didn’t realize until I read it there that you (Leslie) are a fellow Tennessean. If the UT system takes your work to heart, do you think there’s any chance of getting TBR to catch up to the new millennium (maybe as part of their new “sustainable business model”)? 🙂
you should check out full sail university in orlando florida. They have a degree specific for web design and development at a very fast pace and alot of advanced topics. OOP PHP and javascript theory, css 3.0 and html 5 are some topics.
thats where i went to school..http://www.fullsail.com
I agree that there is a tiered disconnect between the industry and academia, but I don’t necessarily believe that:
1) It is academia’s fault.
2) It is necessarily a problem.
First off, you can go to a trade school and be taught web design (Flash, Photoshop, HTML, AJAX, etc.). The expectation at these institutions is that you will be given an immediate skill set and that you will be able to execute within that skill set at a high level. Part of the advertising message for these schools is that you will be taught by professionals in the fields, and for the most part a terminal degree is not required.
Secondly, you can also attend universities of note and also obtain an education which allows you to work in the interactive field- the topics of study will simply be a little more upstream than those taught at trade schools.
Georgia Tech, CMU, NYU, Indian, USC, U Washingston, Stanford, etc, etc, etc, all offer phenomenal programs in either HCI, Digital Media, or something equivalent. True in most cases you will not encounter classes that are implicitly about web design or one of its subordinate disciplines, but that is because students in these programs are simply expected to acquire that skillset along the way.
You may have an interaction design class where the default programing language is PHP and most likely PHP isn’t taught in the class per se, but the students are expected to either know it or learn it fast. So in this respect, a striking percentage of ‘academic programmers’ are self-taught.
I think something that is often forgotten, or not taught at all, is that what the industry knows as web design to has deep roots in academia- within the works Nelson, Licklider, Sutherland, Buxton, etc… The interaction models that these individuals were prototyping in the 1960’s are still being realized today.
Things like the toolbox I mentioned above (Flash, Photoshop, etc…) may or may not be of passing permanence. For fields like HCI, CS, and Digital Media to stop and become entrenched in these very tactic things would be almost certainly hamper the research that will ultimately determine what this field looks like in 50 years.
I do like the idea of web design professionals getting more involved in education, but I feel that parts of the article are confusing the business model of web design with the academic model of universities.
Companies are for-profit entities that ultimately need to make money. Universities are non-profit organizations that ultimately strive to advance knowledge. Their drivers are completely different and require different credentials to advance their needs. Business needs skill. Academia needs knowledge and degrees.
It’s not so simple to simply ask universities to give up the need to hire people with graduate degrees. Universities are more established than web design, so why is it that universities are broken? Why not ask businesses to hire people who are “unqualified”?, and then spend time training them to be productive in the context of their business? Why isn’t it that web design businesses should change, or at least change their expectations on who they hire?
Like many readers to this great article, I’m a student, and very unsatisfied with my current curriculum. I would love to transfer out, but I’m not really sure what are my options out there!
What school would you recommend?
http://www.alistapart.com/comments/brighterhorizonsforwebeducation?page=2#18
Wow, this article really struck me. I go to an online university, and I am dying for a better education. I though that getting my BA in web development would prepare me for this line of work. instead I feel that I am advanced for my classes and have wasted my time.
Now I will owe a ton of money and not feel ready to work for a company.
I should have continued the path that i started. I originally did all of my studying on my own. I read articles and studied websites online. I bought the latest books and magazines on website coding and trends. I could be spending my times studying on my own and learning more.
Everyday I wish that I could meet real life web designers that could tutor me on the web development standards of today. I feel that as soon as I finally get down one thing, I have a hundred more things to learn. It can get very overwhelming at times.
My point is that this article is 100% true, and I wish I knew this before I started my online schooling venture. The web design teaching at universities needs some serious help!
Thanks for this article!
This article made me realize that I’m not the only one with the same thought on Universities and web design.
I think that employers should also be more assisting. I went out to get my degree because I am serious. So please work with me. Don’t expect me to come out of college knowing PHP, ASP, XHTML, CSS, Illustrator, Photoshop, Flash, etc. proficiently. I love to learn and enhance my skills, but many employers won’t even give me a chance.
nice article, thanks
I don’t think that many of the people interviewed in the article have a clue about the educational environment in the US. One of the overriding issues is accreditation. It is the accreditation groups that require the advanced degrees not the institution. There are valid reasons for this requirement in most cases.
One thing I didn’t mention was Community Colleges. I teach in a community college and I full control (well almost) of the course work. We get to challenge our students with real, hands-on development from web design to graphics to databases to active web page development. From what I have heard the 4-year schools, due to their view of developing the whole person, cannot off this level of pure education in the tools of the trade.
The issue of education cuts both ways. How many of the business types in this article were looking at a skill set that simply isn’t available in a 4-year degree setting but is at a 2-yr school. Yet they put a BSCS in their requirements for the position. Wake up people!
This article gives a commendable comprehensive description of the issue of education and technology. Very thorough, very beautifully guides the reader through the fuzzy and intricate world of academia and web design.
As a graduate of a master’s program in Digital Media Art & Technology at Michigan State University, I have seen a lot of really great things happening in the industry as well as many cultural challenges that will only take time to break down and move through.
The “DMAT master’s program”:http://dmat.msu.edu/ at MSU does a lot of things right, and there are some very intelligent (and young!) professors leading the program as well as very intelligent students that come out of the program. I’m happy to discuss these in more detail, but what I really want to touch on in this post is the cultural tension and the growth that I’ve observed happening in the higher education system.
There is a lingering lack of understanding and respect for the creative and hands-on industry in the higher education institution. This is because the higher education institution was built on the strengths of research and academia from its roots hundreds of years ago. There is a cultural paradigm shift that is happening and needs to continue to gain momentum to really attack this problem. And the cultural problems are the longest and hardest to change.
Evangelizing the education system is just as complex as evangelizing any other industry that our industry is doing now. For example, integrating social media into the journalism/current events industry is a slow but steady process that is mobilizing; same for government. The fact that the recent http://www.recovery.gov was built on the Drupal CMS is a huge step that cannot be under-stated.
We need to do for education what Obama is supporting for government. We need to *show* the education system what it means to make a useable and effective website. Look at the university websites out there, as compared to the industry websites like Apple, HP, Media Temple, etc. If our industry can *show* the education industry, a little bit at a time, what it means to make a good website, educators will see it, and they will want it for themselves. When they want it for themselves, they will begin to get exposed to what it takes to create and maintain a dynamic and cutting edge website.
We need universities to be our clients. And we need to make visible what it means to have and build a quality website. This will fold over one staff member, one professor, one committee, one department, one college and one university at a time – motivating them to create better web professionals themselves, and teaching them what the best web professionals actually do.
We need to hold their hands, teach the professors by fostering their involvement, and make it important to them.
We’re the kids and they’re the parents. Kids need to teach their parents how to do things different until the kids get the opportunity to do it their way and become parents. 🙂
Great article Leslie! Very relevant to the current state of the education system. I’ve been similarly frustrated as I search for a graduate degrees pertaining to the web development.
http://www.digital-web.com/articles/education_of_freaks_and_geeks/
I was in an MLIS program with a focus on web design, but I left halfway through because I felt like I wasn’t really gaining practical knowledge. Since then, I’ve learned a whole lot more from taking courses on CS3 and interning. The program was a huge waste of time and money. I think programs need to look at web design from a practical and academic perspective. Ultimately, a course should enable you to actually be a web designer, and I don’t feel like my program allowed me to do that at all.
Although you hit several absolutely true notes about what Universities don’t have available to them, one thing they often do have is the sabbatical.
Beginning with the premise that “to teach, you must first do”, and in any constantly churning and expanding area of knowledge you must _keep on doing_, then an internship for professors seems a logical solution.
If that’s too hard on the ego for a professor, then call it “research”. On the other hand, the ego delating “internship” _may_ be just what’s required.
As a new faculty member in the IT department of a comprehensive state university, I was hired to teach the intro to web development for our undergraduates. While I do have a Masters degree as required by the accrediting agency, I am a self-taught web developer who started back in the 90’s with HTML 3.2. There simply were no IT programs with a web emphasis to be found back then, and there are no Master’s programs that I know of that focus on the web, so I have tried to keep myself current over the years while working full time as an IT Manager and earning the Masters. Now I finally have a chance to make a difference — but it’s easier said or dreamed than done.
Keep in mind that I work at a state institution and with repeated state budget cuts, funding for the IT program is non-existent (a total of 10K annually for the entire department excluding salaries). We are hard pressed to bring in professional web developers or hold conferences, although we are sponsoring GeekEnd in Savannah this year with the support of the university. http://geekend2010.com/schedule
Our IT program is only 8 years old and we’ve done a lot right, but there are also many challenges. Internships are required of all IT majors in order to graduate, and we see excellent placement rates for our graduates, with an average starting salary of 58K this past year. We have only 7 faculty members for the entire IT program, with 3 of us in the web & multimedia specialization. With all the funding cuts, we are now expected to bring in funds, grants, and donations when we can barely cover the teaching load. If any of you pros out there care to volunteer as a visiting lecturer, please let me know!
Another issue”¦
I’m now teaching XHTML 1.0 strict, CSS, and JavaScript in the intro web development course, having inherited the curriculum from the previous instructor. It is all well and good for students to learn good coding practices, but three quarters of my students are Communication Arts majors. Most of these students have no technical ability to speak of, but they are required to take the course. Some can’t even unzip or attach files let alone grasp XHTML syntax or JavaScript (me – pulling hair out in wads). I can’t help but feel we are going about this in the wrong way; and that the intro course should cover the big picture rather than jump head first into strict code.
Assuming that I can revamp the curriculum to some extent, I’m hoping someone here can provide advice. I want to prepare my students for the future; and I must keep the code in the course, including JavaScript (lite) as it is written into the course objectives. With HTML5 upon us I’d like to make the switch for next semester. The biggest problem aside from HTML5 browser support is finding a text book or other course content that covers introductory HTML5, CSS and JavaScript, but delivers the material in a readable, visual, and interesting way in order to accommodate the needs of non-IT majors. Of course the material needs to challenge the IT majors in the class as well. Educational publishers are just beginning to incorporate HTML5. Can anyone recommend a text book currently in publication or perhaps open courseware that I can design my intro course around?