What is UP with the state of web development courses?
In my job I interview client-side developers on a fairly regular basis. As some of you may know, it’s quite hard to find qualified applicants. A lot of the resumes I read are from folks who started web development in ‘99, taught themselves this new thing called web development, but failed to keep up with the times — I’m always shocked at how many resumes I see that don’t list CSS as a skill.
These people aren’t my problem. If you aren’t interested in continuing education, fine, see you later.
My problem is with the people who just got out of school, actually studied web development (very recently), and still have no CSS, DOM or XHTML skills. Heck, I’m glad if they’ve heard of them!
And, to be precise, my problem isn’t with the people — it’s with the schools who are teaching them legacy crap, and aren’t teaching the skills needed to be competitive, or even competent in today’s market.
This is something that really should be looked into, and I think I will.
Students are paying to learn legacy crap!
May 11th, 2005 at 10:58 am
Well, I’m not sure about your line of work, but from what I have seen, CSS/XHTML/DOM arnt NEEDED for making ones way in the wide world of web design and development. Sure, they are good skills to have, but it is possible to make a site without them.
Just my two cents…
May 11th, 2005 at 11:17 am
I forget that people who don’t know me read this stuff… I’m a client-side web developer for a mid-sized consultancy in Manhattan. We do all kinds of projects from small brochure-ware sites to large, CMS-driven, e-commerce solutions. I hold a fairly senior position, and am responsible for the quality of the code that leaves our shop, as well as making sure the client-side developers we hire are up to snuff.
I think XHTML and the DOM are important, and I could see the argument that they’re “nice to haves,” but CSS is an absolute must. If someone wants a serious career building websites, CSS and standards-based techniques (which I neglected to mention in my post) are the future (and the present, as far as I’m concerned). That’s all there is to it.
May 11th, 2005 at 11:28 am
I took an MIS elective called Web DNA at the Univ of Texas back in 2002 and we learned proper XHTML and some introductory CSS. Not much CSS-P (if any) but cosidering one course covered HTML, CSS, JavaScript, ASP, and a couple of other things I thought it did a decent job getting my feet wet.
It may not have taught me everything I needed to know but it got me interested and at least didn’t teach me things I shouldn’t know. Oh the joys of never having used a spacer gif!
May 11th, 2005 at 12:56 pm
I have to agree with you regarding the currrent state of web instruction in schools. I was lucky enough to have found an instructor early on that taught proper HTML (3.2 in 1998) using notepad as our authoring app. We were forced to learn proper syntax and discover through trial and error when we left a closing caret out of a tag. Sadly, this instructor was part-time and was replaced when Dreamweaver 1.0 came out. Few students in his class really took to this method of web design but came away from his class with a proper foundation in web design and the tools to continue to learn. This instructor even had the wisdom to include a brief history of the web and required that everyone know who Tim Berners-Lee is. The Dreamweaver classes that replaced his class were full of students who felt that they knew everything about web design once they had completed one semester and could go out into the world as full-fledged web professionals.
Since that time, I have noticed that many schools teach web design exclusively with Dreamweaver and many do it poorly. Their justification for this is NOT that it provides a better education but that more students are interested in learning web design using a WYSIWYG editor as opposed to XHTML/CSS alone. So, it becomes an issue of money for schools instead of proper education on this particular subject. Unfortunately, these schools are doing more harm than good in this regard as they are not providing the necessary education to prepare students for a career in this field.
May 11th, 2005 at 1:50 pm
I wholly agree with you. As a recent student at Brooks College (not the best school to go to, but I just wanted a piece of paper that said I knew what I was doing), majoring in web design, all of my classes that involved HTML were as if I was in the good ol’days of ‘96. Spacer GIF’s, table upon table upon table… and the ubiquitus 1024×768 no scrolling. If it weren’t for one teacher at the school, I probably wouldn’t have become interested in the DOM. And it was because of the DOM that I became interested in XHTML, and CSS. I started reading A List Apart and eventually started teaching the rest of my class outside of the actual class.
May 11th, 2005 at 2:53 pm
I agree this is indeed a sad state of affairs. I only graduated two years ago, when - and actually still to this day - the program offers “WWW New Media Design” taught in ImageReady. Luckily, I somehow surfed around enough to come across standards/css/etc.
I know in the department I came from it’s much like you said with your applicants. Mostly from when the web was young and didn’t bother to keep up with technologies or improve on their skills. Then these same people hire more teachers without these skills and it perpetuates from there.
It would be great to see some programs adopt more modern methods and get with the times.
May 11th, 2005 at 4:58 pm
I have CSS listed in my skillset.. but only for the sake of full disclosure. However, it’s a skill that I would think is just expected at this stage, and not even necessary to list; I would very surprised indeed to interview a web developer that did not know CSS & Web Standards given the current development climate.
(for the record, I started doing web development in ‘96 and have done my best to kept up with emerging technologies)
May 11th, 2005 at 7:42 pm
Thankfully, I think we’re at least seeing fewer people who were taught everything they know about “web design” in Flash. I still work with developers much more senior than I who misuse Flash because they’re too ignorant or lazy to code some nice DHTML.
May 11th, 2005 at 8:04 pm
Excellent point!
I teach a Web Design course at an Institute in Australia and we make sure that all our students have a good knowledge of Web Standards, HTML, CSS, the DOM and JavaScript.
We also have a very heavy ‘Art and Design’ component including colour theory and interface design and we also teach information gathering techniques for gathering info from clients.
Web Design is art.
May 12th, 2005 at 12:58 am
As a past student of Mugga (lol) in Australia I have to say many people take from the Web Design and Web Admin certificate 4 courses what they put into them. While I’ve met some who have a high bar I also seem to run into some that don’t know a cracker - and still land decent jobs! I think the hardest thing to achieve is a consistency between course intakes as well as across campuses. While doing Mugga’s course (and part time Bachelor of Computing at UTAS) I had dealings with the southern team delivering the same competencies… they were under par. Yet both give the same certificate…
What I’m saying is that I agree with the idea that some people, not all, are graduating with no idea or interest in underlying technologies. Others have exemplary skillsets. But what’s worse is that employers here just don’t seem that interested in the skills base I’ve developed, so my only option is a hard slog as a struggling freelancer…
May 12th, 2005 at 3:34 am
I’m not entirely sure the value of these courses anyway, no matter how good some of them can be. The best way to learn is doing. Personal websites and blogs can be set up in minutes, giving you an instant sandbox to play at making a site in. When we were recruiting recently candidates with a personal or hobby site really stood out - even more so if it was actually good.
May 12th, 2005 at 6:39 am
You beat me to it here. I was planning on writing a bit on this topic myself. I agree with you wholeheartedly. Dreamweaver is the current “tool of choice” in Web development courses and while it’s certainly better than using something as aweful as MS Word or FrontPage, it’s far from the end-all, be-all of devleopment apps. I took a Web development class a year or two ago (didn’t need it but couldn’t opt out of it) and what they taught was a joke. While they did advocate the use of Dreamweaver, they did try to teach some code and some very minimal CSS but they did a horrible job of it—not even considering standards. Everything I know, I had to teach myself on the fly but I would have appreciated some decent help when I was first starting.
May 12th, 2005 at 5:02 pm
Three years ago I graduated from a Multimedia Production and Design program at my local College. A year later I was working for the College as a Web Developer.
This past year, at my insistence, they began teaching web standards, and quite effectively. They sparked the “student” area of the CSS Zen Garden.
However, there are still “Office Administrator” programs in the College that are teaching Frontpage — and don’t bother using the HTML tab either. :( Now they’re talking about teaching Dreamweaver instead — without the code view. Because the instructors haven’t learned -about- standards yet, and are resisting doing so (they’re “too busy for that”). Sigh…
May 12th, 2005 at 6:13 pm
It is so funny to be reading this because I recently thought about getting a job as a web designer for a company and have gone on a few interviews in the past couple of weeks. I joined the standards bandwagon about six months ago, and after creating a few sites using standards, refuse to work any other way. I live in South Florida and can not find a job as a web designer because I do not use tables. How crazy is that? I wrote a post on my site about a job interview I had with a staffing agency here in South Flrida that specialized in placing web designers. They had no idea what standards were. Because of this I have decided to can the idea of working for some one else and continue freelancing.
May 12th, 2005 at 8:58 pm
Much of what I would reply has been stated, but I teach standards-based web design. I believe it’s a case of that ‘give a man a fish and he eats for a day, teach him how to fish…’ thing. Learning how to code (I demand valid XHTML1 strict) tells the student what’s really going on. It really helps remove the impression that you just plug in Dreamweaver.
That impression remains, however. Similar to Rhiannon’s experience, I got a call from a firm looking for interns to do web, and they needed to know Dreamweaver. No mention of CSS, standards, accessibility, etc.
It’s my belief to persist in teaching the best-use tools, rather than teaching to the lowest common denominator. If you know what to do, you can figure out how to get it done.
May 12th, 2005 at 9:33 pm
I’d have to disagree with whoever wrote self-taught is better than uni or college taught. Doing is half of the chore and understanding underlying principles of the technology involved are important too - thus formal education such as university. Learning PHP for instance involves knowing about a bunch of stuff like HTTP, security and basic software engineering skills about creating maintainable code. I’ve found both college and university are weak in different areas. A student also has to be ready to learn… the number one big mistake of many students who go to learn web development is that
they believe they already know how to make web pages and will not do it any other way…
so its not always the course. Sometimes its the student’s arrogance that their self taught hacking ways be the mightiest and wisest. If you just don’t get the idea of accessibility or usability or why you might want to make tableless sites, or even why code should be well commented and created with a process, then nothing can change that, they’ll keep making crap.
I get a bit disappointed when large companies hire those people in preference over standards compliant hand coders.
May 12th, 2005 at 10:06 pm
[…] The question has to be asked and I guess a recent post by Tim Murtaugh gave it the legs for me to write about. Do web develop […]
May 13th, 2005 at 1:12 am
As a web design student at a local community college I have been introduced to legacy html and jumped to js, and Dreamweaver. I’ve been studying xhtml and css on my own, thanks to books like “designing with webstandards” that have opened my eyes to what is going on in the industry that I’m getting myself into.
May 13th, 2005 at 11:09 pm
[…] all know that I teach a web design course, so this article by Tim Murtaugh called: “What is UP with the state of web development courses?R […]
May 19th, 2005 at 11:29 pm
Ironically enough, an old colleague of mine is going to be teaching Grad Level web development at a pretty prominent state university this fall. I kiddingly asked if I could sit in, and she told me I would be bored to death because they are starting with WYSIWYGs since most of these students have never handcoded a page in their curriculum.
This is GRAD LEVEL!
May 26th, 2005 at 12:55 pm
Tim this is so true, I have a similar role to yourself, responsible for the quality control of our front code.
I think your comment ‘We do all kinds of projects from small brochure-ware sites to large, CMS-driven, e-commerce solutions’ is the base of the problem.
If all that is taught is the design of small broucher-ware sites there’s no requirement to understand the need and efficiency which is only possible with the use of CSS, DOM and standards.