Just on the heels of the launching of the Opera Web Standards Curriculum, the Web Standards Project (WaSP) Education Task Force announces that it will create a curriculum framework for educational institutions and aspiring web professionals.
This will include recommendations on course dependencies, learning competencies, readings, tools, and other resources that will help bring web standards to the classrooms. It’s called a framework, rather than a rigid curriculum itself, to keep it an ever-growing reference for teaching of web standards.
Why is it called a framework? Given the velocity at which Web technology unravels, we recognize that required skill sets can change rapidly, and that the best way to keep this material useful is for the education community to enrich it with their expertise and experiences. In this way, the WaSP Curriculum Framework will be a “living curriculum” that we hope would be a knowledge base of required skills.
The results of the 2007 curriculum survey give us a good idea of what classroom-based web standards education looks like. Below is a graph that shows what the survey respondents believe are the necessary topics taught in such classes.
WaSP Curriculum Survey Results Chart 3
I’m glad that things are picking up speed particularly in this area. As I have mentioned in my post about Opera WSC, it’s important that aspiring web professionals learn these concepts from the very beginning. And to do this, educational institutions must make sure they are teaching standards-based web design and not, say, tables-based HTML. (Gasp!)
The Opera Web Standards Curriculum is a comprehensive online course that teaches you standards-based web design. This includes not only coding in the web’s foundational languages, HTML, CSS, Javascript, but also design theory.
One of the authors, Chris Heilmann, describes it as “probably the most thorough and up-to-date web standards curriculum on the web”. He writes:
During the whole course the main focus is on usability, accessibility and writing maintainable code. We deliberately left out browser hacks and backward facing solutions and build on the ideas of progressive enhancement and unobtrusive JavaScript.
I must also point out that WSC is part of Opera Education, an initiative that pushes for web standards awareness and enthusiasm for the internet industry, specifically in schools and universities. I think it’s important for these two parties—browser software makers and educational institutions—to work together rather than apart in developing the Web. In this regard, Molly Holzschlag believes the course is an A+:
The impressive aspect of the curriculum as it is now is that it’s comprehensive, including foundational topics such as Internet and Web history and evolution. Educators understand that history provides context for real learning. Sadly, this is an area often not available in books and online tutorials because readers typically want to dive right in and learn a given technique.
It’s difficult to find a course that focuses solely on creating things through the internet. It’s almost always integrated with either graphic design (see MTV Engine Room) or computer science. Because of this, there is no focus on employing the best practices in creating beautiful, functional websites. And it will continue to be that way—all the way into the workplace—without those two entities joining forces.
This is why I continue to admire Opera. (Mozilla does, too.) It pushes projects that are interesting and beneficial to the web community. Here’s another example: Opera Dragonfly. Firefox’s FireBug wasn’t created by Mozilla (although Safari’s Debugger is a native feature).
And unlike other browser vendors out there, Opera shows it cares about web standards not by saying but by doing.
