Design/Education

I know, I know. It's been over a month since anyone's updated the blog. Alas, the Web students are in other classes, and I can't force them to contribute this quarter. They'll be back in my clutches soon enough, but in the meantime I'll try to post regularly.

I was inspired to post today by the "Elevate Web Design at the University Level" article at A List Apart. The first couple of sentences are real grabbers: "Let's face it. Technology moves fast; academia doesn't." A couple of gross understatements if I've ever heard one. Greased lightning and glacial are descriptions that come to mind.

I know why technology is changing so rapidly; check out "Blur: The Speed of Change in the Connected Economy", Ray Kurzweil's essay "The Law of Accelerating Returns", Moore's Law, or, heck, even Alvin Toffler's "Future Shock."

I haven't a clue why academia moves so slowly, although it's had that kind of a reputation as long as I can remember. I don't think we can blame it on technology-wary faculty or historical precedent. Most of the teachers I know are passionate about their teaching and totally devoted to their students. Colleges just seem to be, well, inefficient. Higher ed E-marketing guru Karlyn Morissette seems to agree with me.

On the other hand, Eugene Hickok, deputy secretary of education under President Bush, thinks it's because higher education "is a culture seriously out of touch with America." Of course, he thinks No Child Left Behind is a good thing. I'm particularly amused by his perception of university faculty:

"Faculty members decide what they want to teach and when they want to teach, if, indeed, they teach at all. This is particularly true regarding undergraduate instruction, which is something of an afterthought on many campuses. Faculty members typically spend fewer than 200 hours a year in the classroom. That amounts to just five 40-hour weeks."

I wonder what planet this guy is from. (Just for fun, let's do the Math. I love Math. Math is good! Faculty are required to teach 18 hours a quarter, minimum. That's 18hrs/wk * 11 weeks/qtr * 3 quarters/yr or, roughly, just short of 15 40-hour weeks. Wow. Sounds like we're slackers, eh? Well, that's just the teaching part. Then there's office hours working directly with students and the time we spend preparing our lessons which is somewhere in the same vicinity of time spent teaching. [Actually it's a lot more than that, but let's cut Eugene some slack.] Hah. Back to 33 hour-hour weeks. Still short of working our hands to the bone? Remember that's only 9 months. We get summers off, sure, but we don't get paid for it.)

Anyway, back to A List Apart.

Leslie Jensen-Inman had heard complaints about the state of the education of web designers and developers and she set out to find out how true they were. (Leslie is an Assistant Professor at the University of Tennessee as well as an active web designer) So, she interviewed 32 leaders in web design and while every one of them thought that a formal education of the next gen of web professionals was important, they also thought that higher ed was, um, out of touch with reality. Here's just one quote from the research:

"The culture of large educational institutions has, in my experience, consistently proven itself unable to cope with the demands of such a varied and fast-moving industry. I know many good people are trying, but I’ve yet to see anyone come out of a university program knowing what they’d need to know in order for us to hire them." James Archer of Forty Agency

Ouch! Well, wait just a cotton-picking minute here. The Digital Media Design program is a mite different from your run of the mill "university program", and I can tell you why. It's because the faculty in our program are all working professionals, too.

That's right, when we're not teaching, we're actually up to our elbows in digital design ourselves. I run my own design company, Interactive Engineers, and our other faculty—full time and part time—run their own businesses or freelance. We work with the same tools we teach, we develop lessons based on the real world projects we've developed. And we apply the same grueling deadlines and pour on the same kind of critiques that our clients give us.

If there is any DMD student out there who thinks our program is a walk in the park, please raise your hand. Hah. I thought not. Take that, Greg Storey:

"I find that students are used to having more time to complete projects than is required in business. It would be handy if students were taken through a series of real-world exercises and projects that made them studio-ready as soon as that diploma hits their hand."

And while we know that teaching current technology is critical to our students' success, we know it's even more important to teach our students how to teach themselves after they've graduated. Technologies will keep changing at an ever-faster pace, and they've got to adapt and grow.

I was especially struck, though, by the validation of something I've been saying here at COTC for the last seven years: Designers are designers because they design, not because they have a terminal degree. Designers learn by designing, and design instruction MUST come from designers, not from book-taught, research-oriented educators who have never gotten their hands dirty in the field they are teaching. Here's what one top designer had to say about this snobby—and mostly irrelevant—attitude still prevalent at colleges:

"Hire instructors that are relevant. By and large, educational institutions are not doing this…I was contacted by a large university about teaching web design and was quite interested. Then they found out I had no graduate-level degree. So instead, they hired a retired Java programmer to teach, ‘web design.’ Huh?

Most of the relevant folks in the industry today don’t have graduate-level degrees in web design or development. (My emphasis) Why? Because web design and development programs didn’t exist when we came through school. Most of us stopped going to school as soon as we realized the schools weren’t teaching us anything relevant. (Me, again)

To be more relevant, colleges and universities are going to have to get over their accreditation standards and hire the people doing great work on the web today to teach. That’s really the only way…Likewise, they can’t expect the same folks that have been teaching graphic design for 30 years to really be competent web design teachers. They need new blood—people that really understand this stuff and are passionate about it." Jeff Croft, Blue Flavor

Okay, okay: long post. Snow day. Left me free to think. Or grouse. You choose.

But I think it is incredibly important for a design program to teach design by designers who design in the current, real world. That's the kind of staff we've built here at the Digital Media Design program at COTC, and, as long as I'm still breathing, it's what I'm going to continue to fight for. Our students deserve that kind of an education.