TT280, TT281 & TT282

The web Development certificate consists of 6 'short' (12 week) courses which are scheduled from May 2002 to at least 2010. The courses are mix of level 2 and 3 courses and like T171 are delivered entirely over the internet via the course website and First Class, the OU's email and conferencing software.  Upon successful completion of all six course you gain the Web Development Certificate as well as 60 points towards a a degree.

The first course is TT280 Web Applications: Design, Development and Management and it looks at HTML and CSS, web standards, browser compatibility, usability, accessibility and navigation. The course consisted of 3 CMA's (Computer Marked Assignments which is the OU's fancy name for Multiple Choice Questions) and an ECA (End of Course Assessment, which is basically a project that takes the place of a written examination).

I took the October 2002 presentation of the course, which was the first 'live' presentation (a an earlier trial presentation had been run in May 2002). There were one or two hiccups with the course, in the first two of the 3 CMA one of the questions was subsequently 'zero weighted' (not marked) due to the question being somewhat ambiguous. The weekly Study Guides were only released by the course team only a few days before they were due to be studied, prompting some student to complain they were unable to 'read ahead' and the project books for the CMA were again only released 10 days or so before the CMA cut off date, leaving little time to complete them. The feedback for the final CMA was some what late arriving and did not (to my knowledge) appear on the course website but only in the First Class conference). Hopefully the course team will have taken on board these and other criticisms form students for future presentations of this and the other WDC courses.

The ECA for TT280 was to write a report for a company seeking to create an online sales website, looking at the various issues raised during the course, (eg Site Mission Statement, Site Structure, Standards used in creating web documents, cross-browser compatibility issues, usability, accessibility and navigation). You also had to design four example webpage's to W3C HTML 4 Transitional standard taking into consideration these issues. The webpage's we had to design were a Home Page, Catalogue Page, User Survey and History Page (as company wanted to display some of its 400 year history on the web!).

The other Courses in the Web Development Certificate are:

TT281 The Client side of Application Development

Taken in May 2003 - a look at Javascript and the various 'issues' surrounding its use, such as browser compatibility and versioning and how it can enhance websites by improving the user experience and enhancing navigation.

TT282 The Server side of Application Development

Taken in October 2003 - a look at Active Server Pages (the generic ASP, not Microsoft's .NET malarkey) and server side scripting including creating users sessions and a dummy shopping basket type application.

TT380 Databases within website design

Not taken yet - will probably do so in 2007

TT381 Open Source Development Tools

TT382 Web Server management, Performance and Tuning.