General:

There were 5 assignments in this course, each building upon the knowledge gained in the previous assignments. Your first assignment starts off with a knowledge of just a few HTML tags and NO CSS. From there, you add more tags, but you are NOT allowed to go beyond the material you have taken. It's not until assignment 5, that you are allowed to use CSS at all.

The good:

This was a good course to get introduced to the way they do things in the MDIA series of courses. You are supplied with reading material, online forums, publishing capabilities. You need to submit assignments that get marked and so on.

The bad:

Most of the MDIA 1206 assignments required that the users NOT use CSS for styling, but rather to use HTML tags. This was acceptable, however it was also a Dreamweaver course, and the design mode of CS4 doesn't easily permit this.

The marking:

If you want to maximize your marks (for any of these courses), you'll stick with the course material and get it PERFECT. That is, no HTML errors or warnings, no CSS errors or warnings. The W3C checkers are not adequate. You need something with additional checking power, such as the CSE Validator. Validate everything! Although you can declare transitional xhtml in your header, you had better code as if it's strict. You will be marked as such.

Adding cool functionality to your assignments doesn't amount to much. Make a mistake anywhere and you'll lose marks quickly. If your goal is to stretch yourself technically, then be prepared to lose some marks unless everything is absolutely perfect.

Make sure you know exactly what the instructor wants. Has (s)he provided any examples? Are your classmates publishing their work? If not, it should be strongly encouraged.

I've experienced this marking style in later courses as well, so be prepared.

Recommendation:

Considering that many of the remaining courses are about programming HTML/CSS/Javascript and so on for the web, I would recommend dropping the Dreamweaver Design mode early on and focus on coding right off the bat. As a matter of fact, the students may be better off using another tool, such as Webuilder, Notepad++ or BBEdit so as to completely avoid the temptation to use Dreamweaver's Design mode. I would just offer MDIA 1205 and drop 1206 entirely.