Web Teaching Day - 6 Sep 2010

On Monday, 6 Sept 2010 I attended a Web Teaching Day organised by Richard Eskins from Manchester Metropolitan University (his blog). We do a fair amount of web teaching in this group so I thought it would be useful to go along. Web teaching is undertaken by the Computing Department or the Art / Design department in most Universities and our courses tend to be very business orientated.

In many ways the conversations I had reminded me of those we have regarding Information Systems at John Moores. There's a problem relating to the range of skills required from basic technical skills, through design skills to high level inter personal skills. Our aim is to produce a "hybrid" graduate combining business with systems / technical skills. There's huge demand in industry for these graduates and our best students command very high salaries but students find the work hard and it difficult to recruit good students.

Web design / development courses have very similar aims.

Some of the highlights of the day:

Chris Mills from Opera talked about the Opera Web Standards Curriculum. He's been producing teaching material for students all of which is freely available on the internet. He also talked about Mozilla's P2PU (Peer to Peer University) programme - School of Webcraft which is aimed at delivering and assessing these skills. He's co-author on Interact with Web Standards: A Holistic Approach to Web Design (Voices That Matter).

David Watson from Greenwich University talked about the course he designed and runs - MA in Web Design and Content Planning. They've produced their own site to support the course. One interesting point he made is that he reckoned that this site had increased applicants to the course significantly, they now have 60 applicants for 20 places whereas before they struggled for numbers. He published his presentation here. He had some interesting observations on setting up and running the course. In particular don't depend on the University to market and recruit students to your course, you may end up with no students.

Christopher Murphy and Nik Persson (also known as the Web Standardistas) talked about their course BSc (Hons) Interactive Multimedia Design at Ulster University and the issues involved in delivering to undergraduates. I particularly liked their use of the nerd (Bill Gates) - designer (Steve Jobs) continuum to describe the difficulties of being a web builder and how you need so many disparate skills along this path. Here are some of the tools they recommend. Their book is HTML and CSS Web Standards Solutions: A Web Standardistas' Approach.

Aesha Zafar from the BBC talked about the new developments in Manchester and, in particular, the jobs that will be created there and Nicola Critchlow talked about the gap between industry's needs and graduates being produced by Universities (which is large and getting larger, nothing new there).

Finally, Andy Clarke, a freelance designer led a group discussion and chat at the end.

So what skills does a graduate from a web design / development course need? This is my list based on the nerd - designer continuum:

• databases
• server side programming languages (PHP seems to be in vogue though there are others)
• Javascript
• CSS
• HTML including web development tools
• graphics
• design
• people skills

It was an excellent day with lots of really inspiring speakers and it really got me fired up about the possibilities of delivering a web design / development course at John Moores. I don't believe that the course I want to offer exists here (though that's based on absolutely no research whatsoever!).

Our team has really strong skills in databases, programming, HTML, CSS and Javascript and we teach most of these skills at various levels. The people skills elements are taught throughout all our courses and is embedded in all JMU programmes via the World of Work (WoW) programme.

Our weakness is in design / graphics, however, Liverpool School of Art & Design has huge experience in areas such as graphic design and digital media.

So, here's a great opportunity to collaborate on a new course in an area that is growing in popularity.

Making the inaccessible accessible (from an information retrieval perspective)

Websites using Adobe Flash have attracted a lot of criticism over the years, and understandably so. Flash websites break all the rules that make (X)HTML great. They (generally) exemplify poor usability and remain woefully inaccessible to visually impaired users, or those with low bandwidth. Browser support also remains a big problem. However, even those web designers unwilling to relinquish Flash for the aforementioned reasons have done so because Flash has remained inaccessible to all the major search engines, thereby causing serious problems if making your website discoverable is a key concern. Even my brother - historically a huge Flash aficionado - a few years ago conceded that Flash on the web was a bad thing – primarily because of the issues it raises for search engine indexing.

Still, if you look hard enough, you will find many that insist on using it. And these chaps will be pleased to learn that the Official Google Blog has announced that Google have been developing an algorithm for crawling textual Flash content (e.g. menus, buttons and banners, “self-contained Flash websites”, etc.). Improved visibility of Flash content is henceforth order of the day.

But to my mind this is both good news and bad news (well, mainly bad news...). Aside from being championed by a particular breed of web designer, Flash has fallen out of favour with webbies precisely because of the indexing problems associated with it. This, in turn, has promoted an increase in good web design practice, such as compliance with open standards, accessibility and usability. Search engine visibility was, in essence, a big stick with which to whip the Flashers into shape (the carrot of improved website accessibility wasn’t big enough!). Now that the indexing problems have been (partly) resolved, the much celebrated decline in Flash might soon end; we may even see a resurgence of irritating animation and totally unusable navigation systems. I have little desire to visit such websites, even if they are now discoverable.