Web Design in Scotland Sucks | Part One
Time for a sweeping statement to grab your attention, web design in Scotland sucks.
You might think I’m coming across as a pompus young upstart but as someone who has came through the educational system gaining a BSC Hons degree in Multimedia Technology I think that I’m pretty well placed to broadcast this viewpoint. I’m going to split this topic over two articles, so that you’re not having to read one mammoth report on my thoughts and how I think we should go about fixing it.
A bit of background on me
I left school without really knowing what I wanted to do. I’d pinned all my hopes on doing something science related as this was the route that my school encouraged everyone to go down but my heart was never really in it and in the end I ended up failing miserably.
I actually owe a huge amount of gratitude to a family friend who set me down the path of becoming a web designer. She worked in my local college and told me of a new course that had just opened up with interviews being held later on in the week for the last remaining places. Seeing as I didn’t have anything else lined up and had a passing interest in computers I went along, not expecting much. A few days later I found out I had made the cut, even without any knowledge of computer based subjects, make of that what you will.
College & University
My opinion of College is actually better than that of University and below I’ll give a brief insight into both:
College
My College experience was great, it covered everything you could want in a beginner course. The fact that the course was brand new definitely had something to do with this, they had obviously had the benefit of reviewing other institutions and realising what worked and what didn’t. Another thing the department had going for them, which I’ll touch on later, was the fact that every single member of staff had been sourced from a web background and knew exactly what they were talking about.
I owe alot to one lecturer in particular, who took me through building my first “Hello World” website to my first full-blown site, with calls to the database and a good site hierarchy. I’ve yet to meet another person who shares that same passion for their work.
University
This is where the introduction of web standards, across the board, would pay dividends. I had spent the last two years learning the fundamentals on how to construct a website but it turned out that the vast majority of my new University classmates had not, so we all had to enter into the mandatory one month refresher course.
The refresher course actually turned out to be terrible, the lecturer who was handed the task of getting everyone up to speed didn’t really seem to even grasps the most basic of html tags. How did I know this I hear you ask, well one of his many mistakes was in telling people that it was still ok to create websites with tables, if you so wished.
Once the refresher course was out of the way we finally got let loose on our project, to create a web site for an imaginary local music band. When I got my mark back I couldn’t believe it, I was being marked down for the most bizarre things. Two things I remember vividly from my feedback were;
- Your main menu
ul id="menu"is not wrapped in a div - You’re website doesn’t render the same across every website.
Of course, we all know now that the last one is poppycock.
Another thing that really irritated me during that module was the fact that I was being marked down, incorrectly, whereas other students who were creating their projects in tables without any form of penalisation.
If the truth be told, I only stayed at University for that bit of paper as the rest of the subjects simply didn’t interest me. I often wonder whether employers actually care if you have an academic qualification when it comes down to getting a job in web design but that’s for another conversation entirely.
How would I improve the courses
Lecturers
As it turned out the lecturer, mentioned above, would take two of my other classes that year, which is far too much work for anyone to take on. How can a lecturer be expected to continue their learning in a fast moving industry such as web design and the two other projects he was having to take whilst also teaching his students coupled with all of the marking of projects and examination papers that being a lecturer entails.
It is also probably fair to assume that the lecturer is just like everyone else and will have a better understanding in some subject areas than he will in others. In this case web design was obviously his least favourite subject and therefore didn’t spend as much time reading into it as he did with his other subjects.
So how would I reform this area? Well, for a start I think that we need to get rid of the idea that people teaching tech subjects, specifically web design, need to hold a masters degree because in reality a lot of web professionals are self-taught or their studies are from completely unrelated backgrounds. I’m going out on a limb here but do people like Jeffrey Zeldman, Andy Clarke or Dan Cederholm have degrees in web design, I doubt it.
I highlighted above that my College lecturers were great because they were sourced from working environments and because of this they were more up-to-date on newer techniques and discussions. They also shared the same passion as the students, which was vital.
Call in the big guns
I can’t comment on all parts of the United Kingdom but I know that up here in Scotland when it comes to web events we have close to zero. Which is why I believe that Universities, certainly the bigger ones that can afford it, should use some of their department budget to pull in a guest speaker occasionally.
Excuse the lame analogy but hearing a guest speaker, who is high up in their field, coming to speak to a bunch of young progessionals would be akin to your footballing hero speaking to you when you were younger. These big guns have the ability to come in and stir emotion in anyone. They will be able to tell their audience of their past experiences and what they done when they were just starting out.
Work placements
Some Universities are great for offering work placements within their degree courses, sending out students during the summer months to learn more about the subject area but I believe that this is an area which should be mandatory for all University students.
University cannot offer you the real world experience that working within an agency will give you. These internships would be able to offer you the chance to put your textbook learning into practice. Another plus about being able to work in a company, is that you will be surrounded by lots of people who are passionate about their work and this is something that you certainly won’t get in University.
In Summary
This article has focused solely on my experiences in the education sector of web design and some of the areas I think we should look at reforming. It is probably only fair to point out that my experiences will not be a good reference point for Scotland as a whole but I do believe that there are probably more bad institutions than good ones.
I know some of the people who read and comment on here have/are attending University, so I’m looking for your input on this subject too. Was I way off the mark, have you encountered similar problems, what do you think we, as recent, graduates should do?
Next up I’m tackling Scottish web professionals and conferences.
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Who I am
My name is Jack Osborne and I am a Glasgow–based designer and writer. You should follow me on Twitter.
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What I do
I am a front-end developer with proficiency in; accessibility, design, semantics, usability & web standards.
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Where I do it
I am currently working freelance and I am available for hire. Feel free to get in touch with me if you fancy a chat.
I have to agree with you, My university experience was worse than yours, I did an access course into a computer science degree that I was told had web modules included.
Needless to say what I already knew more than covered the material for the single module.
I dropped out towards the end of the first year and went on to do a 2 year e-commerce course at a college. While it was better than the uni in terms of content, we were editing asp in notepad and using access for learning DB management.
I wonder if an organisation such as the open university could offer a course more adequately than an institution. There is plenty of subject matter floating around about development. It would just require someone to collate and modularise it.
It’s not just Scotland either, it kind of seems that if you’re not in the south then there’s not much going on. I am lucky enough to live in Norfolk and we just had our first “conference” that I have ever heard of, though it wasn’t really a tech driven event.
People who leave college/university and only use the techniques taught to them by there lectures are the group that gives Scotland a bad name in web design.
The worst part I think is not only when you see some one coding horribly but also the design looks like utter crap … and yet they think when they leave college/university there going to walk straight into a 30k job in a design agency.
The best thing to do is pull the finger out and teach yourself !
I got your comment on my similar article, Jack, so you know I am on your line of thinking with this too.
When I was in my second year of University we had a “Designer” in trying to teach us some CSS. He was showing us basic stuff like how to format a paragraph using the ellusive “p” tag. Needless to say I was somewhat underwhelmed by the level it was being aimed at.
My degree was mixture of web design, graphic design, and multimedia design (BSc Multimedia Computing and Design). Some parts of it were taught better than others. The web design stuff was generally awful. But the graphic design classes were superb, and this was down to the quality of the lecturers.
A lot of my classmates hated my course because some felt it was too unfocused, but I loved it by the end because I got enough experience doing creative work, and technical stuff to make a decision about what I wanted to do (which still actually changes from time to time).
I would be keep to see what everyone else things about their University courses and how they were taught too…
I had a similar experience to you, but given that we did the same college course and went to the same uni that is to be expected. College was great, but my university course was so uninspiring and disappointing that I flunked it in the end, being more interested in doing my own thing at home.
In fact, even front-end development was similar. Getting marked down for the most ridiculous and stupid reasons when, true story, another group were permitted to take a (cheap) paid-for, table-based template and tweak it slightly.
But like Brad said, this isn’t restricted to Scotland (and certainly isn’t restricted to web development/design). Even so, web development/design is no longer a new thing, it’s been going on long enough to warrant some solid courses. It may be ever evolving, but some things don’t change (approach mark-up with correct semantics in mind, separate presentation and content, progressive enhancement, etc) and the right lecturers will keep up with what is important to them and their course.
I forgot to mention too that I was also a victim of getting marked down for using (basic) code that was beyond what we were demonstrated in class. I the lecturer why, and he told me that he suspected I had cheated using something like Dreamweaver. After I was done LOL’ing at him, I sat down and write out a few basic CSS declarations to prove this stuff wasn’t difficult… he apologised and moved the mark back up.
I agree too, although my university experience was good. I went into a computing degree knowing I wanted to work with computers, but with no idea what area I wanted to specialise in.
The course was broad but I learnt about key concepts such as user interface design, object orientated programming, database normalisation and writing valid mark-up (and we were penalised for invalid mark-up too!).
It was my work placement, managing computer networks, that made me realise I didn’t want to that for the rest of my career. I enjoyed web development so started to learn PHP and MySQL in my free time and for my final year project built a simple database driven website.
The things I gained from university were a knowledge of core concepts, a passion for a particular career and most importantly the ability and desire to learn. I definitely think without university I probably wouldn’t have became a web developer.
While I broadly agree with your title, and the post, I think they’re not necessarily related.
My experience of school/college/university web courses are near exactly the same as yours and probably most of the other blog posts I’ve read on the same subject.
As for the web scene in Scotland… well what scene? I’ll hold my comments there for now
Looking forward to the second post.
I can’t really comment on college as I have never experienced it (although have looked into the courses at Dundee college – and they are poor).
I think you’ve just had a bad experience with university.
I do agree with some of what you have said, e.g. about some lecturers not knowing the basic fundimentals of web design – there are a few in my university who don’t. Also that marking of your module was poor, although if it was specified in the coursework document that the site had to look/function the same in certain browsers then that point was fair enough.
But some of the other things I have to disagree about.
The point about web professionals not having degrees in web design – of course they don’t, degrees in web design didn’t start up until the mid to late 90′s (and a lot of web professionals have degrees in other areas of media/design).
The point about web conferences/speakers is a valid one (but one that is starting to change). For example the other week we had Rachel Andrew (http://www.rachelandrew.co.uk/)come up and give a guest lecture at our university, and there are plans to get more professionals to come up as that was a big success (150 or so people turned up – we were only expecting 30 or so) – the idea is to get at least two each year to come and speak in Dundee. As for conferences there is scotch on the rocks (although I think they may have moved to London now…), NEON, Scotish Ruby Conference and I there is one that is based in Glasgow but I can’t remember the name of it right now…
Actually, the head of my course has a relatively good idea (although I’m not sure if he can pull it off – I hope so) of creating a web design conference in Dundee around the time of our course’s degree show (the idea being that it’ll bring people interested in web design to Dundee for the conference and hopefully they’ll take some time to have a look at how the uni’s web design course is going/the honours students current projects). It’s getting the funding for it that seems to be the problem (as he can’t guarantee to his superiors that so many people will come to it they don’t want to fund it – I think thats why he’s starting to get guest speakers coming to the uni – to try and show that there is a demand for them and the conference would be a success).
The thing you’ll find is most web design events in Scotland are happening over here in the East (as that is where most of the web design/multimedia/marketing companies are based).
I could probably write a good amount on this subject in response to this (and I may just do so).
Nick seems to be experiencing a much better time at university than I did, and I’ve a feeling I went to the same uni. I suppose it’s good to hear things have improved since I graduated last year. Not that I was ever particularly interested in academia.
I think I’m in the same camp as you, Jack – graduating for the bit of paper. Though I am grateful for the knowledge I gained in my first 2 years, I agree that having the right people to lead the way is a definite benefit.
Our best lecturer left when we were half way through the course. As a result, I lost all interest in the coursework and, in 3rd and 4th year, happily settled for below average grades. I’ll go out on a limb and say that I don’t rate university and wouldn’t recommend it to anyone. Just buy the right books and get a job while you learn instead. Which is probably a little bit of a controversial thing to say, but it’s an honest opinion and a quite accurate analogue for the actual university experience, albeit without the cape induced photo frenzy at the end of your four years.
I think we are in quite similar situations. Apart from you’re still in Scotland and I moved to the (alleged) centre of the known universe.
I learned a lot very quickly down here. I’ve spoken to some very knowledgeable and some very highly respected members of the web community. Now I think, more than ever, that my university experience was a wasted effort. There’s a bit of a paradox here since a) I wouldn’t have looked much into web design if it weren’t for uni and b) I made some great friends at uni so really shouldn’t knock it too hard, but I digress.
I was recently given a brilliant piece of advice for which I am incredibly grateful. I was told to look out for opportunities to get involved in the community (meetups, conferences, that kind of thing), and if no events were appealing to me, then to start my own.
In the end, there were plenty of free events for me to get involved with and attending has made a huge difference to my outlook. I wanted to pass the advice on.
I’m certain you’d be able to get something together in Scotland. Even something small to begin with. I’m pretty sure some of the event organisers from around the country would help you out if you asked for some tips too. But don’t give up on the community in Scotland, because you’re near Glasgow and if you do, they’ll set aboot ye’.
Ramble ramble ramble. Stop!
Hi Jack.
I didn’t study anything web related at college, instead I studied drumming (hah), but when I found myself becoming intrigued by the online world, I enrolled in an evening ‘web development’ class at the same college that you spent those first few years at. My experience was pretty abysmal and I left after three classes (which spanned three weeks).
First of all, they were teaching web development on beat up, old PCs in a version of Dreamweaver I didn’t know still existed, the example code they encouraged us to copy/replicate was ludicrously messy, and we weren’t discouraged to use non-semantic code. The lecturer herself didn’t appear to know an awful lot about the subject and instead seemed to be teaching off the back of text books (maybe the evening lecturers were different to the full-time ones?), and because I already had familiarised myself with some basic HTML and CSS, I felt way too advanced for the class. Which was silly, but there you go.
The Scottish education system in general has disappointed me many times, and I can confidently say I would never feel comfortable being educated in any web language because of the pace the industry moves at. Quite simply, I just don’t think lecturers are enthused to keep up with it.
Anyway, great write-up — web design in Scotland does suck!
@Grant Abertay?
I think I’ve had a pretty good run of things at Abertay compared to most, although I think some of that has been down to me signing up to do things/networking with people (e.g. I signed up to do a project for the BBC as my group project in 3rd year instead of doing one of the ones they give you – learned a lot, met a lot of good people and so on).
I doubt any academic course will ever be perfect, for a start different people have different expectations of the course in the first place. Then theres the fact they have to have so many modules that comply with the BSC so they can keep that accreditation, then so many modules with groupwork and whatever else so they can keep it as a degree course (or honours in my case).
On the plus side, they are changing things here (it always seems to be the year or two years after me though) for the better. They’re getting rid of the old modules and starting to add new ones in (even teaching new technology – e.g. a web standards module in 1st year instead of 2nd which also touches upon HTML5 and CSS3).
I think the general theme here is that formal education in web design is of a low standard and even if someone attends a course they have to do their own learning out with the course. I’m currently at university and seriously considering if it’s worth coming back after the summer as the level of teaching is so low and the vast majority of content delivered is outdated and irrelevant. My particular favourite lecturer fails to show up 90% of the time and when he does still thinks that tables are ok for layout!
Web Design at college and university is still relatively young and has the potential to turn into something good, but I think the relative youth of the industry and few individuals who are prepared to teach it mean that the standard is so low at the moment. Work placements would be a great idea as it would provide “real world” experience to students and show up the poor level of teaching within uni, in turn leading to this improving.
I think either current students or recent graduates can help by pointing out where these institutions have gone wrong and telling them about what content is needed, or maybe even offering to talk to current students after you’ve left to show them what it’s like in an agency and encourage them to learn more about the current issues.
My experiences echo the feelings of most people here. I’ll leave out the name to protect the guilty but I attended a local college to do a multimedia and web-design HNC (after dropping out of my Criminology degree, and you thought Ashley’s drumming was random!)
It was awful. They still taught Macromedia Director, all development was done within Dreamweaver, there was never a mention of web standards or even CSS (AFAIR) and I spent most of each class correcting the lecturer.
I lasted nearly the full term until I decided it was a waste of my time and went and got a proper development job. Actually that was the only good thing about the course, it gave me time to play with my own side projects without having to work (thank you student loan) which helped me discover that I was much better at development than design, and enjoyed it a lot more as well.
My first month “on the job” taught me more than the entire term did in College, actually I probably learnt more in the first week.
I kept in touch with some of my classmates. Most completed the HNC and went on to do a HND (Or is it the other way round?) and a few even went onto University. As they had completed 2 years in College already they were allowed to jump straight into 3rd year University. But by this point they had still never, not once, coded a site by hand. They’d never even looked at a piece of scripting. I think only 2 of my former classmates managed to pass that 3rd year in Uni.