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Ask Slashdot: Modern Web Development Applied Science Associates Degree?

Posted by samzenpus on from the teach-them-well dept.

First time accepted submitter campingman777 writes "I am being asked by students to develop an associates of applied science in modern web development at my community college. I proposed the curriculum to some other web forums and they were absolutely against it. Their argument was that students would not learn enough higher math, algorithms, and data structures to be viable employees when their industry changes every five years. As part of our mission is to turn out employees immediately ready for the work force, is teaching knowledge-based careers as a vocation appropriate?"

4 of 246 comments (clear)

  1. Yes by jnelson4765 · · Score: 5, Informative

    I work in a company writing online billing software. We use Perl and Ruby. We don't need people who know quicksort vs. bubble sort - we need people who understand browsers, and AJAX calls, and JSON, and business logic. I never touch anything more complicated in math than basic algebra.

    Javascript, CSS, and something other than PHP are what you need to know, with a leavening of SQL and XML. Screw all that CompSci crap - we don't use it in 99.9% of our code.

    --
    Why can't I mod "-1 Idiot"?
  2. Re:I'm confused by campingman777 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    SEMESTER 1
            English I
            Intro to computers (or waived) (CIS 100)
            Programming tools (Github, IDEs, StackExchange, JIRA)
            Intro to Programming Logic (CIS 104)

    SEMESTER 2
            Algebra I
            English II (tech writing)
            Project Management (software)
            Web Development I (HTML & CSS)

    SEMSTER 3
            Government
            Interpersonal Communication
            Databases I (re-visit & modify current offering)
            Web Development II (Javascript & jQuery)

    SEMESTER 4
            Cultural Anthropology
            Introduction to Unix (CIS 140)
            Web Development III (node.js, MVC frameworks, e-commerce)
            Capstone Project

  3. Change? In the web? Not really. by mveloso · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Javascript and HTML haven't changed all that much. CSS? It's getting to the point where change is slowing down. Web architectures have been stable for years.

    Nobody in real life uses higher math in front-end web development. They might use multiplication and division to do layouts. It's debatable whether anyone actually uses algorithms. Data structures would be handy, but it's also arguable whether web developers actually understand them or not - especially if you talk to any DBA about how website A uses the RDBMS.

    Web frameworks would be handy. There are general things about frameworks that don't change.

    What would be good would be some discussion around the process of building a website, from customer requirements to deployment. How to choose a technology, payment processor, server technology, etc.

  4. Re:Not a good idea by NotDrWho · · Score: 5, Insightful

    i agree that anything that's relevant now will not be 2 years from now

    -sarcasm on-
    Yeah, remember back in the 90's when html, javascript, java, etc. were important for web developers? All long forgotten now.

    Not to mention all the OOP languages that were all gone within 2 years of being introduced--like C, C++, etc.
    -sarcasm off-

    Do you people ever actually read what you type?

    --
    SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.