The assignments for all of my BCIT MDIA courses are located at www.tuline.com/BCIT.

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• The material is often out of date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.
• Provide an end of course feedback by students, and have a 'lessons learned' session 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, I feel that 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%.

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. The attached PDF file is a summary 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.

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