Summary
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Opera launch the Web Standards Curriculum; a set of tutorials and articles promoting web standards.
Author: Bruce Lawson
At Opera, we've heard lots of anecdotes about the poor quality of education out there, with web design being stuck in the late 90s (mal-)practice. The fact that graduates are hitting the job market without any idea of web standards, accessibility or user-centric design is bad for our industry, bad for all industry because every organisation needs a webs site, and it's bad for the Web itself.
So we decided to do something about it. The brainchild of Chris Mills, our Developer Relationship Manager, who's been working for 9 years or so eductating people about Standards, we've launched the Opera Web Standards Curriculum. It's a free, creative commons licensed course designed to give anyone a solid grounding in web design/development, no matter who they are — it is completely free to use, accessible, and assumes no previous knowledge.
At the moment there are 23 tutorials and exercises, but we're planning to expand them to about 50 by the end of the Summer. We hope that the curriculum will be adopted or adapted by universities, colleges, corporate in-house training programmes, or used by individuals trying to better their skills.
If you're an educator and would like help in using the curriculum, get in touch. If you have an idea for more coursework, or spot an ambiguity or even (shudder) an error, please let us know on the Web Standards Curriculum forums — it's a collaborative course, to be shared and changed to suit your local needs.
Or just spread the word, and help us educate the next generation of web professionals.
Category: Accessibility.
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Web standards is something we should all promote no doubt and I will help spread the word by downloading a banner and doing a post about your cause for web standards.
Posted by Jillian on
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Thanks for doing this. It is always surprising to me when I learn how many people are still out there that don't know the first thing about the Internet in general or Web Design. I'm going to check out the tutorials myself, I'm sure I'll learn something from them myself! I appreciate all the hard work that must have been involved in doing this; keep up the good work!
Posted by Jerry on
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I'm so happy to have found your blog and learned about the tutorials. I'm sure they will be of great assistance to me.
Thank you.
Posted by Elaine on
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Web standards are great, but with all the template based designs out there today, I personally believe that "web development" as we know it has come to pass. This is the era of the CMS and CSS. After all, if you can take the exact same code and create hundreds of unique sites with only style changes, why wouldn't you.
Posted by CD on
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My class was divided three parts in front-end, back-end and web APIs. In case of front-end, I taught web standards skill and philosophy in part of front-end including separation of structure and style, principals of dom scripting and web accessibility.
Posted by Jo Presse on
[opera-web-standards-curriculum.php#comment6]
Bruce,
Cheers mate. Sounds good to me. As an instructor for the State of Alaska's new Web Accessibility Training team for state employees, I will be speaking to them about this and see if it is something they will be interested in working with.
Kyle Lamson
Posted by LSW on