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Where in the UK can you get a good distance-learning qualification in web design?

  • Which distance learning institutions in the UK have the best reputations, particularly for web design? My sister (who has a BA in Art History and Film Studies, if that's any help to you) is looking to get into web design, and thinks a distance learning qualification may be the best way of doing it. This is both for employment purposes, as she's thinking of getting into digital media, and also for helping out with things like her church's website or with friends who want to set up sites. Distance learning's probably the best option here for convenience and also for cost, the economy being what it is right now. She's Googled for places that offer this kind of course, but has got a bit stuck because there's no obvious way of knowing which of them is a fly-by-night operation and which will actually give her something useful. As I'm working in software development, she's asked me for help, but sadly I don't know anything about these places' reputations either, which is where you come in! So, which institutions have you used or heard good/bad things about? I've already found the Open University's Design and the Web course - is this a good option, and if not then what else would you recommend?

  • Answer:

    Personally, I'd avoid "institutions" for this. IME, most are behind the times (count those that teach HTML5, I dare ya) and overpriced. Web design isn't a subject with any compelling official "qualifications" and getting a job comes down more to your portfolio and how well you present yourself and talk about your skills in interviews and online (e.g. on your blog). She would do a lot better to combine self learning from books, screencasts, and reading tutorials and guides by the leading lights of the industry, rather than learning from behind the times no-hopers. If she wants/needs something more structured to get going, Lynda.com has a ton of Web design e-courses and you can get access to them all from $25 per month. I've followed a few in the past and they've always been very well produced and provide enough info for you to confidently move on to other resources later.

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It's also not a coincidence that the best Web designers I've worked with have all been self motivated self learners, and that most of the "qualified" ones are stuck in Dreamweaver or FrontPage land or throwing together code that couldn't pass validation in a million years. As with programming, a lot of passion and self motivation is necessary to be truly good.

wackybrit

I would check out http://scrunchup.com/ a UK webzine dedicated to people learning web design and motivated by very http://scrunchup.com/issue-0/why-we-made-scrunchup/. They might be able to recommend an institution, or at least warn you off incredibly evil ones. I've heard good things about http://carsonified.com/ and their Think Vitamin training (though I think it's getting rebranded soon as Think Vitamin makes no sense!) Their content is much more targeted to web developers who want to improve their skills as opposed to absolute beginners. On the whole, formal institutions are not particularly good at teaching web development and design, it seems to sit in a no-mans land between graphic design and computer science. And when they do teach web skills, they're often bizarrely situated in odd departments such as education and students end up learning out of date practice (tables for layout!) or just develop application proficiency in Dreamweaver orFrontPage. If your sister does begin to ask around to different schools she might want to ask if they use the http://www.webstandards.org/'s http://interact.webstandards.org/curriculum/ as the basis for their teaching. Disclaimer - So, I work in the area of web developer education advocacy and have connections with many of the projects I've linked to. You might want your sister to check out the project I directly work with, the http://www.drumbeat.org/p2pu-webcraft. SoW is a peer-based, free, online learning community for standards based and open web development run in partnership with http://mozilla.org and the http://p2pu.org project.

pipstar

I was at a http://www.londonwebstandards.org/2010/10/web-education-lwsedu-live-blog/, one of the speakers was the founder of the Scrunchup webzine that pipstar mentioned. Additional links: http://openwebeducation.org/ and http://www.opera.com/company/education/curriculum/.

robertc

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