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.