RE: research about web design education in the UK

Hi Helen,
This sounds very interesting to me and I'd be very interested in knowing more and how you get on with this research. I'll start off with saying I think it's fantastic that a UK academic is actually interested in the state of Web design education in the UK and researching it to help the industry in some way, that's really good for us (the Web design / development industry).
I agree with what you say in that we should research the different avenues of Web design education. For example at my University, I'm studying a computer science degree which contains some Web design / development modules, these modules are also taught on a multimedia & internet technology degree, as well as media courses in a different faculty. The modules are changed around for different students depending on the course they're doing. The Web design / development modules that the media students take are slightly different from the modules the computer science and multimedia & internet technology students take. Why? I don't know. HTML is HTML, if you want to create a Web page with Web standards compliant markup it has to be the same. Just because the media students aren't on a programming course doesn't mean they shouldn't learn how to write markup the correct way. Likewise if they decided to add a design based module to my computer science degree I'd expect it to teach everything the right and correct way, not differently because we aren't design oriented students, would that not put us at a disadvantage? They change it to make it easier on the students on the media degree, but the problem is that some of them media students may go into a part-time Web design job and end up publishing non-standards compliant markup. The version of the module for the media students is also taught by a different lecturer in the media / design faculty as opposed to the lecturer teaching it in the computer science and engineering faculty. Again, why? Neither of the lecturers have ever actually been commissioned to design / develop / produce a Website for anybody so their industry experience for that particular subject module is zero. I'm a current student at University, and this is just one of the problems existing in UK education today.
I agree with you that research should be undertaken and would be interesting, but I also agree with Alexander Dawson - It SEEMS like this research may just be pointing fingers and not solving the issue we have. But perhaps we need to point fingers first, with actual research and facts behind us, before we can do something about it. I'm not sure, but I guess this is why we're all here, right? To create a Web standards curriculum that won't have these problems.

Please do update this list and let us know if you need any help or feedback on anything related to the research. I'd be very happy to help.
Kind regards,
Andrew Cooper