I love IU. I think it’s a great university with many talented faculty members and endless resources for students. I’ve never regretted my decision to come here and pursue my degree in informatics. Just last month, the university announced that they had struck a deal with Adobe to provide CS4 to everyone for free! This is great because numerous departments offer courses utilizing this software and there are free workshops for learning to use the software as well. Once all of this great multimedia is created, most courses leave students without proper instruction on how to properly present it online. There aren’t any courses that offer more than the w3schools’ xhtml tutorials. It’s time for Indiana University to teach web standards that’ll prepare students for the professional world!

This “call to action” comes after reading Elevate Web Design at the University Level by LESLIE JENSEN-INMAN and my continued frustration from the last year of teaching outdated material, interning with a global top 50 company who didn’t know what “web standards” were, and now facing another semester of outdated and boring material anyone could learn by searching for free online tutorials.

I’ve only been in one class at IU that stressed web standards and it wasn’t in informatics or computer science! Since then I’ve been instructed to teach students non-standard methods in the computer science department and have even worked in groups where members argued against the importance of using web standards (he was a informatics/computer science major). I still haven’t found a class that goes beyond teaching the W3School’s XHTML and CSS tutorials. How are students supposed to compete in the job markets with no real web development instruction? Why hasn’t the School of Informatics addressed this when most of the capstone projects end up being web-based?

From the educational initiatives I read about in Brighter Horizons for Web Education by AARRON WALTER,I think the WaSP Educational Task Force and their WaSP Curriculum Framework sounds most appealing. The courses would already be designed so instructors wouldn’t need to invest a lot of their own time into making their own versions. Everything is being released with a Creative Commons license and as PDFs so these courses would be cheap for both the department and students. The Opera Web Standards Curriculum (Opera WSC) also sounded interesting, but by adopting the WaSP Curriculum Framework, you’re also adopting the Opera WSC.

“Incidentally, many of the WaSP Curriculum Framework courses will include Opera’s articles as recommended readings and will tie directly into the learning competencies, assignments, and exam questions in foundational courses.”

I know academia is slow, but if the WCF is released in March of this year how unrealistic is it to have a course or two setup by Fall 2009 or Spring 2010? The courses are laid out for the SOI so all they’d need to do is find someone to stand in front of the class to instruct. I agree with LESLIE JENSEN-INMAN who said:

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.

My entrepreneur class this semester is being taught by adjunct professor Mark Hill who is a respected entrepreneur in Indianapolis. Why couldn’t someone from the SproutBox team in Bloomington come in to lead these web standards courses or even a talented graduate or undergraduate student?

I have just over 100 days left at IU so it might be too late for me to start some sort of student-led evangelical movement. I think I will pass along these ideas to lecturer Matt Hottell, who heads the capstone projects, Richelle Brown, the Director of Student Academic Support, Jeremy Podany, the director of career services, and Cameron Schnick, who has been involved with the Informatics Student Association and also on Twitter. It’s time IU (and SOI) takes web standards seriously because people like Jeffery Dawald and companies like Media Works are the results of poor education on the subject.