WaSP‘s InterAct Curriculum was specifically developed to help take some of the pressure off current educators in creating and maintaining a curriculum based on current industry standards. Thanks to the work of numerous educators and industry professionals, the InterAct Curriculum accomplishes that. The current, and initial, release contains 11 courses that fall into one of six general tracks:

• Foundations
• Front-end Development
• Design
• User Science
• Server-side Development
• Professional Practices

A Complete Package

There’s a lot of work that went into the development of the curriculum. For each course there are assignments, core competencies, learning modules, recommend textbooks and additional recommended reading. The content in each course is carefully selected, the books include fantastic titles like Designing with Web Standards and PPK on Javascript, and the recommended reading contains some great writing from around the web, including articles from Opera’s web curriculum.

There are two other releases scheduled, one in March of 2010 and one sometime after that. Each will contain a few more courses, as outlined in their roadmap. The best part is, this is an ongoing project and community driven. That means that the curriculum will not become stagnant, but will continue to evolve with current industry standards.

Getting Involved

Being community driven, there are plenty of ways to get involved. Educators can contribute assignments and modules that they’ve implemented in their own courses and believe to be helpful. There is also a place to discuss the curriculum and input suggestions or criticisms to help fine tune the subjects addressed.

Get the Word Out

I doubt if many educators (if any for that matter) will argue against the value of having the curriculum available to them. Considering all the work that went into its development, and the fact that industry experts were envolved, ensuring that the curriculum lines up with current practices, it’s just too valuable a resource to pass on. I think the biggest challenge then, is to make sure and get the word out about the curriculum.

We need to go out and start sharing the information with local college professors and advisory teams. If we can start communicating the value of adjusting existing curriculum to model the roadmap laid down by WaSP, that would go a very long ways in speeding up the adoption of these courses and helping to increase the level of competence for new professionals fresh out of school.

As a recently graduated student, I can reflect on both my training and the training of other people my age who attended other colleges for web development that I interacted with. Unfortunately, the majority of the people I’ve communicated with stated the same thing: standards based development was not presented as a priority. CSS was glossed over and there was little to no mention of the DOM and unobtrusive scripting techniques in the Javascript courses.

Why Colleges Can’t Keep Up

A large part of this is due to the fact that our industry moves so quickly. Progress is made at such an incredible pace and new technologies soon emerge while old ones fade away. In contrast, changing the curriculum at a college usually takes awhile, making it very difficult for schools to keep up.

Another issue is that some of the best candidates for taking on the role of instructor in these courses are overlooked due to a lack of degree. It would be great to have industry-tested professionals teach the courses…who better to teach a class about the techniques and tools that will be necessary in the field than those who are doing it, and have been doing it for some time.

That is not meant to be a criticism of all current instructors. As always, there are exceptions to the rule. There are industry professionals who have no place standing in front of a class and teaching technique, and likewise there are instructors who do a fantastic job of presenting their classes with quality information. And many of the other instructors simply have their hands tied by what the college allows them to do and not do.

One thing I do like seeing is that a few instructors who are pushing standards-based development forward in their courses have published their class information. Daniel Mall and William Craft are just two examples of people who are pushing forward with standards based development instruction and then sharing with others what they are doing. This opens the door for critiquing from industry professionals and provides an example of what other instructors might consider basing their coursework around.

How Do We Fix It

So what needs to be done? Universities and colleges need to adjust. Traditional methods of updating curriculum simply do not work when it comes to such a fast-paced industry. These institutions need to be making a concerted effort to keep their curriculum up to date with current industry standards, and as a result, the curriculum should be re-evaluated on a very regular basis.

In the mean time, a temporary fix may be to implement some sort of a rotating course, a generic web development study course. The course could be used to highlight emerging industry standards and could rotate on a semester basis. Again, just a temporary fix, but at least it provides a small level of attention to the techniques that the students will be needing.

I’d also like to see a few schools start taking a look at allowing existing professionals to instruct more courses, regardless of higher-education degree status. There is a lot of insight they can offer and it’s a shame that schools are not tapping into that.

Of course, that door swings both ways. I’d love to see us as professionals get more involved in helping colleges to evaluate and update their curriculum. I applaud Opera and the people behind their new Web Standards Curriculum. If you haven’t seen it yet, take a look. They are putting together a series of 50 articles or so highlighting areas in web design and development. This is exactly the kind of thing that can really help colleges by providing a guideline for what to build their new curriculum around.

Let Me Hear Your Thoughts

This is a topic that interests me very much. Eventually I would love to start teaching a bit myself…I love sharing what I’ve learned with others and find the teaching experience to be very rewarding. That is why I pay attention to what the current colleges are doing to try and stay ahead of the game a bit. I would love to hear any input you might have on the topic. Trying to improve web education in colleges is not an easy task and I think getting more opinions and discussion on the matter are exactly what is needed to come up with a better way to help get colleges up to speed and keep them there.