Cain’t Take it No MO!!!

Okay. I have a pseudo rant type thing brewing about DeVry. I’ll get to that in a moment.

But first, should any of you lost souls be interested in a rather long-winded story behind why I’m about to say what I’m about to say, you can do that here. Go ahead, I’ll wait…

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Now down to bizness.

Here we are, a scant 5 months later and I can guarantee you I’m a lot more chafed by this whole ‘school’ thing. I’m sitting here now with a headache, not believing what I’m seeing from what is supposed to be our educational system.

Having just started my second year of school, I’m just…appalled.

I’m in the process of surviving my seventh semester (13th class) in this place and, frankly, I’ve not learned much of anything from more than a handful of my classes. Nothing that we’ve covered so far is anything I didn’t know. Oh, except for Stats – and I have a math Geek at my beck and call so why the hell would I need that?

General Ed BS aside, I’m almost done with class 7/9 of what I’m guessing is supposed to be the Web Graphic Design portion of the Multimedia Core. ‘Advanced Web Design.’ In the earlier courses, we covered all the goodies like web standards, accessibility, information design, etc. Two classes yet to go and we were tasked with the first of what I’m guessing will be a few team projects. I figured I’d be slick and get myself nominated team lead, saving myself the trouble of being embroiled in a fiasco. MISTAKE. It became that much more apparent how ignorant ‘we’ are becoming.

I have a question. How in the hell can you teach anything related to the web without at least a crash course in HTML? Srsly. These people are supposed to be making graphics for the web and the best DeVry can do is offer two courses on how to use Dreamweaver of all things?? (Two so far – I told one of my advisors to get me the hell out of WGD classes for at least a few semesters and she was most accommodating – and apologetic that my educational experience with them has been so craptacular.) Classes 8 and 9 will include ‘Instructional Design’ (do that plenty well enough, TYVM!!) and ‘Media Portfolio’ (got one – no SIX!).

I’m almost willing to bet they won’t be offering HTML – even in their Web Development track. These kids are at such a disadvantage. Sure, learning how to use Dreamweaver is all fine and good BUT why bother if they’re not going to have ANY idea how to read what’s in the Code view?

While I get that the degree involves more than web coding, I’m just at a complete loss here. When I was at Lively, the first book we read for our web design certification was a book on XHTML and CSS. Head First HTML with CSS & XHTML, to be exact. (THEN we got into graphics, scripting, and all that other good stuff.) It’s a good book, easy to read, and with as quickly as these classes go, it would be nothing for DeVry to at LEAST do HTML for ‘Web Design’ and save Dreamweaver for Advanced. At least then all my wonderful teammates would at least have an idea of how to fix what Dreamweaver fux up!

I seriously don’t know how much more I can take it.