I've now taken several Internet based courses at in the MDIA program at BCIT, and I feel that there's a few recurrent themes in need of change:

• The material is often out of date
• The forums are almost dead
• We don't hear from the instructors much

I would suspect there's very little budget to update the material once, yet alone on a continuing basis. Also, I would suspect that some of the instructors are frustrated with the current layout of the program. Therefore, I have the following recommendations:

• Find a training partner, such as Lynda.com. They could provide most of the material, and the instructors could focus on assignments.
• Create a common set of forums for ALL members of the MDIA program.
• Allow for an end of course feedback by students, and have a 'lessons learned' with management and instructors. Make decisions, create action items, and set/followup with deadlines.

In order to try and become relevant with the web development industry, BCIT is going to have to make significant changes to their program. Let's hope they've started something already.

This course provides the students a background in XML and really seems to take HTML into a different slant.

My understanding of XML is that it's purely used to store data records, and we covered that in the course. What's more intersting is the way we used XML in the assignments:

1. Assignment 1 - Create a file called index.xml which contains the various fields of an invoice.
2. Assigment 2 - You are provided an XML file with 37 Shakespeare plays and are expected to create an index.html which will list those play and link to each one.
3. Assignment 3 - Take those same plays and format them using XSL stylesheets.
4. Assignment 4 - Using the MS-XML DOM, we were to render a page using Javascript, which linked an XML and XSL file.
5. Assignment 5 - Starting with XML and XSL files, we were to create an HTML file using a parser.

As you can see, we went well beyond the basics of XML data structure definitions. Did I like the class? Many folks I talked to had a tough time with this course, however I thought it was interesting and gave me a better appreciation for XHTML and web standards. One big thing I got out of the course was a better understanding of the use of 'CDATA' within XML files.

I was quite happy with my final mark of 96%.

Links

• Developing for Drupal
• Coding Standards
• Drupal API's
• Drupal Handbooks
• Basic Module Examples

Drupal Books

• Learning Drupal 6 Module Development
• Pro Drupal Development

Other resources

• W3Schools

This is a critical course for independent consultants, as it clearly shows that the 'techie' portion of our business is only one small aspect. I recommend this course as it's a wake up call as to what it would take to get your web design practice up and running.

My final mark for this course was 91%.

This course is starting out well. The instructor had the forums configured to support each of the assignments. In addition, she had a Link area to each of our assignments as well. That's a pleasant change from the previous courses I've taken.

On the downside, some of the information is a bit out of date (ie using Netscape Navigator 7 in the web browser comparison chart), however that's nothing new compared to the other courses in this program.

Some of the work in xml seems to be bleeding in that it only works on certain browsers. I do, however like the fact that in assignment #2, we're given xml and it's up to us to style it. Too bad it's xml and not xhtml though. Shades of the CSS Zen Garden. Great practice.

Unit 7 is using the XML DOM, and uses a proprietary Microsoft version. This is unsettling, as a standards based XML DOM does seem to be available. More research required. . .

Getting into the home stretch of this course, and it's getting a bit strange. Some assignments work with IE but not Firefox and vice versa.

I recommend this course, as it provides us with an introduction of some of the emerging web standards.

So far, the Instructor gets a B, course gets a C.

In the PHP course at BCIT, we learned some important concepts, such as:

• sessions
• cookies
• arrays
• file management
• MySQL
• output buffering
• regular expressions
• and more . .

The text used to support the course was 'PHP Third Edition' by Larry Ullman. The text provided background material for all of these topics, and was supplemented by course material (located at http://webapps.bcit.ca/mdia4325/).

To me, the course was marred by the mistakes in the course materials as well as examples that didn't work.

In December 2009, the Surrey Drupal Group met to discuss the top Drupal modules, tools and other resources that make our life easier. This PDF file is a copy of the results.

It's time for the bi-annual operating system refresh for my home office, so I decided to upgrade my laptop from Windows Vista to Windows 7. What I didn't realize was that my backups were on the edge of failure.

In my role as a web site administrator for a few soccer organizations, I have to publish contact lists (on my Windows based computer) for the executive and coaches.  These lists are generated by volunteers and are always in Microsoft Excel.

The challenge that I have, is that Microsoft Excel spreadsheets often don't translate well when being cut and pasted into a HTML based WYSIWYG editor and then published to the Internet. I have seen things like: