Teaching Accessible Web Design to Business Students: A Compilation of Tools for Beginners

When it comes to asynchronous online learning, the literature recommends multimedia content like videos of lectures and demonstrations. However, the lack of emotional connection and the absence of teacher support in these video materials can be detrimental to student success. We proposed incorporating talking heads and annotations to alleviate these weaknesses. In this study, we investigated the cognitive and affective effects of integrating these solutions in asynchronous video lectures. Guided by the theoretical lens of Cognitive Theory of Multimedia Learning and Cognitive-Affective Theory of Learning with Media, we produced a total of 72 videos (average = four videos per subtopic) with a mean duration of 258 seconds (range = 193 to 318 seconds). To comparatively assess our video treatments (i.e., regular videos, videos with face, videos with annotation, or videos with face and annotation), we conducted an educational-based cluster randomized controlled trial within a 14-week academic period with four cohorts of students enrolled in an introductory web design and development course. We recorded a total of 42,425 total page views (212.13 page views per student) for all web browsing activities within the online learning platform. Moreover, 39.92% (16,935 views) of these page views were attributed to the video pages accumulating a total of 47,665 minutes of watch time. Our findings suggest that combining talking heads and annotations in asynchronous video lectures yielded the highest learning performance, longest watch time, and highest satisfaction, engagement, and attitude scores. These discoveries have significant implications for designing video lectures for online education to support students’ activities and engagement. Therefore, we concluded that academic institutions, curriculum developers, instructional designers, and educators should consider these findings before relocating face-to-face courses to online learning systems to maximize the benefits of video-based learning.

The digital media industry has developed rapidly in the information age, leading to an increasing demand for talent. Chinese universities have set up digital media art and digital media technology majors based on digital technologies, but the learning engagement of students in these two majors remains a research gap. Using the web design and development course at Nanfang College, Guangzhou as an example, this paper explores the learning engagement of digital media art and digital media technology students. It first introduces the training directions of digital media majors in China and the curriculum and teaching of digital media majors at Nanfang College, Guangzhou. It then elaborates on the concept and measurement methods of learning engagement, and finally conducts statistical analysis on a small sample with selected metrics to discuss whether students of digital media art and digital media technology majors have some differentiated characteristics in their learning engagement.

Web accessibility is becoming a relevant topic with an increased number of people with disabilities and the elderly using the web. Numerous legislations are being passed that require the web to be universally accessible to all people, regardless of their abilities and age. Despite this trend, university curricula still teach traditional web development without addressing accessibility as a topic. To investigate this matter closely, we studied the syllabi of web development courses at one university to evaluate whether the topic of accessibility was taught there. Additionally, we conducted a survey with nineteen students who were enrolled in a web development course, and we interviewed three lecturers from the same university. Our findings suggest that the topic of accessibility is not covered in web development courses, although both students and lecturers think that it should. This generates lack of competence in accessibility. The findings also confirm the finding of previous studies that, among web developers, there is a low familiarity with accessibility guidelines and policies. An interesting finding we uncovered was that gender affects the motivation to learn about accessibility. Females were driven by personal reasons, which we attribute to females having an increased sense of empathy. Finally, our participants were divided in their opinions whether accessibility contributes to usability.

This work explores the integration of Generative AI (GenAI) tools into web development educational settings, with a focus on enhancing the user experience (UX) design process and supporting students with limited technical backgrounds. The democratization of GenAI has allowed non-technical users to engage in the creation of computing applications. However, its adoption among UX-focused learners remains limited. In this study, we propose an innovative instructional approach designed to facilitate the effective use of GenAI tools in web development courses for UX designers. This approach is based on incorporating interaction mechanisms that allow students to prompt GenAI tools using an incremental strategy. Moreover, this scaffolding process enables the definition of benchmarks that can be used as a reference for the development tasks proposed and their assessment by comparing the students’ outcomes with the benchmarks provided. The results obtained from applying the proposed approach in a web development course using GitHub Copilot environments show its potential to address the challenges UX design students face in these educational settings.

We are experiencing a qualitatively different era of the Web, as evidenced by most Web applications and websites that have emerged and transpired over recent years. The new Web 2.0 era and the technologies beneath it provide both demands and challenges for IT educators to reform traditional Web Development courses. This paper presents our shared experiences and knowledge in teaching and training students in developing Web 2.0 websites in a sequence of two high-level Web development courses. It aims to fill the gap of lacking literature by providing instructional details of our pedagogical strategies and approaches to the design and delivery of Web development courses in such a unique time in computing history.

One of the primary objectives of software engineering education is the direct and easy transfer of the knowledge and skills taught in the classroom to the student, and correspondingly into the workplace. Immediate application of classroom knowledge in industry has several benefits including the rapid incorporation of research into industry, potential financial benefit to the employer, and improved professional stature of the student. One pedagogical approach to support this transfer of knowledge is the use of student-defined real-world projects. This paper reports on the experiences gained in knowledge and skill transfer from academia into industry in a graduate-level Web application design and development course taught at Rensselaer at Hartford.

In this dissertation, I argue that society increasingly recognizes the value of widespread computational literacy and that one of the most common ways that people are exposed to creative computing today is through web development. Prior research has investigated how beginners learn a wide range of programming languages in a variety of domains, from computer science majors taking introductory programming courses to end-user developers maintaining spreadsheets. Yet, surprisingly little is known about the experiences people have learning web development. What barriers do beginners face when authoring their first web pages? What mistakes do they commonly make when writing HTML and CSS? What are the computational skills and concepts with which they engage? How can tools and practices be designed to support these activities? Through a series of studies, interleaved with the iterative design of an experimental web editor for novices called openHTML, this dissertation aims to fill this gap in the literature and address these questions. In drawing connections between my findings and the existing computing education literature, my goal is to attain a deeper understanding of the skills and concepts at play when beginners learn web development, and to broaden notions about how people can develop computational literacy. This dissertation makes the following contributions: * An account of the barriers students face in an introductory web development course, contextualizing difficulties with learning to read and write code within the broad activity of web development. * The implementation of a web editor called openHTML, which has been designed to support learners by mitigating non-coding aspects of web development so that they can attend to learning HTML and CSS. * A detailed taxonomy of errors people make when writing HTML and CSS to construct simple web pages, derived from an intention-based analysis. * A fine-grained analysis of HTML and CSS syntax errors students make in the initial weeks of a web development course, how they resolve them, and the role validation plays in these outcomes. * Evidence for basic web development as a rich activity involving numerous skills and concepts that can support foundational computational literacy.

Student success is a growing concern in higher education institutions. How can educators create courses that better prepare students for their future careers? The purpose of this paper is to present recommendations that will assist educators in helping students to be successful in college. This paper begins by briefly discussing a service-learning project (SLP). Next, the paper compares the advantages and disadvantages of completing a simulated project against a service-learning project in a web development course from a teacher’s perspective. Additionally, this paper explores the students’ and clients’ perceptions of the advantages and disadvantages of SLPs. This paper also outlines a model for teaching a web development course with the integration of a service-learning project. Finally, the paper concludes with the idea that community service-based projects can benefit all parties involved and should be considered when designing the pedagogy for an advanced web development course. This study, along with others referenced in the paper, finds that service-learning projects provide a framework for structuring an effective course curriculum.

This article describes a small scale ethnographically oriented research study seeking to contribute to understanding student academic literacy practices in a South African vocational, web design and development course. In this course digital multimodal assessments are the main means whereby students demonstrate their learning. The findings of the study provide insights into the contextualised ways in which student academic literacy practices are shaped by academic and professional contexts where digital and multimodal practices are privileged. The academic literacies perspective used in this study, while useful for exploring the nature of student academic literacy practices, has not paid enough attention to theorising how literacy practices are shaped by broader contextual influences. To address this limitation the paper speculates about how the Bernsteinian concept of knowledge recontextualisation might be used alongside an academic literacies frame. The inclusion of an empirical focus on recontextualisation can provide an opportunity to explore how knowledge construction and transformation processes in the academic and professional domains result in the privileging of particular academic literacy practices.

Microsoft ASP.NET is a common web development technology used in web development courses. ASP.NET MVC, a component of ASP.NET technology, provides a means of separating concerns in development and ...

This study investigates students’ performance, perception and acceptance when experiential learning approaches are integrated in Computer Science courses. An experiential learning approach has been designed to assist students in web development courses. The proposed learning approach in based on real-world examples and the abstraction of terminology using a sequential wizard-based logic. A survey model has been constructed and an exploratory study is conducted on 54 under and post graduate students. Results demonstrated high degree of perception and acceptance, as well as high performance scores. No gender differences have been detected in the examined sample and several strong correlations have been found among the measured variables. In particular, perceived ease of use and usefulness are strongly correlated to each other as well as to self-efficacy, willingness to learn and satisfaction. Satisfaction and self-efficacy are not correlated to each other, while performance has not been affected by anyone of the measured variables.

This paper investigates a class of database access errors that occur in the context of a web development course. While the use of an Object-Relational Mapping (ORM) simplifies database access, students still demonstrate reference errors such as mistakenly referring to the whole object rather than an attribute value that is a part of the object. Metonymy, a rhetorical device used in human communication, offers an interpretation to these errors. A study is presented where student answers are reported and analyzed in this context. Findings indicate the prevalence of reference errors and offer instructional strategies for addressing them.

Studies indicate that information systems and computer science programs should place more emphasis on software design topics.Because little significant software in a commercial environment is developed using only programming skills,students without exposure to design patterns and frameworks will be ill-prepared for the workforce. This paper investigates whether PHP-based web development courses should use PHP frameworks to guide program development and how to select an appropriate framework. The paper begins with a literature review of the concept of design patterns, particularly the Model-View-Controller(MVC) pattern. We review studies that argue that design patterns and frameworks are essential pedagogical tools. Finally, we report on our work to select an appropriate framework for incorporation into web development courses as well as the process by which some of the major PHP MVC frameworks were assessed to determine which is best-suited for use in an academic environment.

Exposing students to research topics enhances their learning experience. It is therefore desirable for instructors to include a research component into their courses. The courses most prone for incorporating research components are the upper level undergraduate and graduate courses. However, this becomes challenging in the case of introductory courses, where learning new programming skills is the focus. In this case, the research component needs to satisfy two key conditions: to be easy enough to implement, and to have a fast learning curve. In this paper we describe the introduction of a research component into an introductory Web development course (upper undergraduate and lower graduate) for software engineering students. In this context we present a Web security research application that is successful at keeping unwanted malicious attacks from happening on Web services. It can be implemented using basic Web development skills and fast to learn and rationale. Due to the interdisciplinary nature of the research problem, the students have been exposed to techniques and research topics in several other fields. The projects outcome including student experiences conducting user studies and human surveys are discussed in the paper.

Since 1976, when California State University Northridge (CSUN) began its Annual International Technology and Persons with Disabilities Conference, there have been specialized conferences with an accessibility theme. The first ACM ASSETS Conference was held in 1994 when 22 papers were presented. The Rehabilitation Engineering and Assistive Technology Society of North America (RESNA) began its conference in 1979. The first biennial International Conference on Computers Helping People with Special Needs (under a different name) was held in 1988. Accessibility focused journals have existed since at least 1986. This history demonstrates that accessibility has grown into a separate field in research and practice. While this is true, more and more, accessibility has become mainstream.