The WaSP InterAct Curriculum
The WaSP Education Task Force, of which I am a member, has been working hard for the past year; very hard. The goal of the WaSP Edu TF is to spread awareness of web standards among educational staff. This is a lofty goal with lots of special circumstances and road blocks but albeit a noble one.
We find that one of the major road blocks to getting teachers to teach a standards based curriculum is a lack of resources. Many educators are not familiar with web standards and don't have the time to learn and teach it. This is a hard task, but many teachers are forced to do this in multiple disciplines all the time. But to be honest, at this time there is a fair amount of resources for professionals who wish to learn or adopt web standards, but little to no standards based resources for educators. Learning web standards is one thing, but teaching it another. WaSP Edu TF cites this as a major inhibitor to adoption and chose to act on it. On the cusp of SxSW 2008 the team decided a best practice to moving toward reducing inhibitors for educators would be to develop a standards based curriculum. The curriculum is meant to be a "living" curriculum, meaning that it receives constant updates as specific technologies come and go; which is a great but strenuous concept. That implies constant upkeep; a task we are willing to embrace.
The WaSP Education Task Force was created in 2005 to work directly with educational institutions to help raise awareness of Web standards and accessibility among instructors, administrators, and Web development teams.
Curriculum is a word with a multitude of definitions; we define it as a set of requirements, competencies, evaluation results, assignments, and resources for each course. In addition, the curriculum was originally aligned as a four year program for a college or university major.
The most important feature people should understand is we don't feel this curriculum comes "as is". We don't view this as the way to teach web design and development. We want educators from high schools, community colleges, certificate programs, and four year schools to use what they need. Like a puzzle piece fit it into your scene. Take what you need or take it all; you can use it as the law and change nothing and take what you need and change most of it. Just use it!
Without further ado, I give you the WaSP InterAct Curriculum. I recommend reviewing the overall curriculum structure, an individual course, and the integration guide. Peruse, use, and give us your feedback; we've worked hard to tailor this to you, give us feedback to continue that process.
