Introduction

This article provides a brief review of BCIT's MDIA program for aspiring web designers and developers as well as their new Desire 2 Learn to support online classrooms.

The D2L Environment

The new Desire 2 Learn environment provides features to simulate a classroom environment such as:

• Discussion Area
• Presentation Area
• Quizzes & Surveys
• Content Publishing
• Calendar
• Email
• And more . .

This environment looks a lot like Microsoft Sharepoint and is configurable for each class. There's also an overall Portfolio section as well a a blog. One thing I appreciated is that they can keep your previous classes online long after they have ended.

Rating: A

The Course Material

I've found that the course material has lots of examples and contains more depth than many of the books I've seen on these topics. On the other hand, this material has been updated over the years, often in a haphazard fashion and with examples that no longer work. Much of the 'legacy' content remains and looks outdated as does the presentation. It looks to me that the instructors need to spend more time in order to be on top of the currency, relevancy and quality of their materials.

Rating: C   (B for quantity, D for quality, currency)

Discussion Groups

The D2L environment provides a threaded discussion area for students and their instructor in order create an online classroom. The problem is that the instructors aren't leading the classroom discussion. In some cases, they aren't even posting. This is unfortunate, as this is where BCIT could set themselves apart from their online competitors. In addition, very few of the students are using the discussion areas and thus aren't making much use of the environment.

Rating: D   (B for the technology, F for the instructors, D for the students)

Presentation Area

BCIT provides an FTP/web server so that students can upload their presentations so as to be viewable by others. One problem is that the instructors only provide basic instructions on how to upload files to their presentation area. This seems to be offered as an optional item rather than the educational tool it can be. Students are rarely encouraged to structure their presentation area by course or assignment and thus this cool resource goes underutilized. We don't get a Control Panel either, so functionality is limited to text files.

Note: If you're enrolled in the PHP course, you can get access to a database and PHPMyAdmin.

Rating: C  (B for the technology, D for the instructors, D for the students)

 

Marking System

My understanding of the marking system is that you are deducted marks for the mistakes that you make. On a few assignments, I stretched myself technically as well as artistically and then ran the code through the online W3C validators, which validated the code. The instructor's validation software, however, flagged some warnings, and I lost several marks as a result. My lessons learned were to:

• Use a top notch validator
• Don't try and get fancy
• Don't make ANY mistakes

It was disappointing not to get any marks for trying cool stuff and to lose marks on warnings that the online validators didn't even detect.

Rating: C

 

Conclusion

When looking at the course material, it seems to me that these courses peaked around 2005 and have been in 'maintenance' mode ever since. For example, as of early 2010, both the beginner and advanced Flash courses are still taught using Actionscript 2, despite the introduction of Actionscript 3 in 2006. In addition, many of the links in the course material are no longer working. Finally, current technologies, such as Flex, Silverlight and CMS's are nowhere to be found.

What could set BCIT apart is the (very excellent) D2L classroom environment with instructors assigned to assist/lead the class. The only problem is, the instructors do not seem to be doing this. They aren't leading the class in discussion, posing interesting challenges and rarely join in the discussion threads (few as they are). Many instructors don't appear to be encouraging students to post their assignments and share with the others. They really aren’t creating a classroom environment at all. I don't believe the BCIT program will reach its potential until the instructors really engage themselves and their students in this online program. That being said, it's a two way street, and the students really need to engage themselves in order to take advantage of the the networking potential offered by this program. Check out Sitepoint's forums for an example of a vibrant online community.

In the meantime, online resources such as lynda.com, smashingmagazine.com, tutsplus.com and interact.webstandards.org provide better and more current material. They just don't seem to offer the structured classroom environment that BCIT does.

Overall Rating: C

Feel free to send any comments to atuline at gmail dot com.