Full Sail Uni advertised in the September DaniWeb Digest

[cobberas]

I'm not sure if this is the right forum for this discussion, but anyhow here goes...

The September issue of DaniWeb Digest mentions Full Sail University’s Web Design and Development Bachelor's Degree Program Online.

I'm curious - what do DaniWeb people think of this course? Can it really "teach you the essential tools to get started on your career path" as a web designer/developer?

According to the Full Sail site, the areas of focus are
Java Script
XHTML
CSS
XML
Flash Design
Flash Animation
Action Script

Most positions involving web applications development that I've seen advertised require a strong background in all of the above PLUS at least MySQL, PHP and/or C# and .NET technologies, and sometimes also Linux.

Would love to know your thoughts.

Cheers
cobberas

[blud]

I've actually looked into Full Sail university before DaniWeb ever mentioned them. Supposedly, they are *really* good, if you are willing to commit the time to them. Most of those technologies are going to be used for a *long* time, although personally I wouldn't invest too much in flash now days.

[VernonDozier]

>> Can it really "teach you the essential tools to get started on your career path" as a web designer/developer?

IMO "web designer" and "web developer" are two separate jobs requiring two separate, though overlapping skillsets.

"Web Developer" would involve more of the back-end coding. The "CSS" and "Flash Animation" skills might not be all that relevant. The designer would give you the Flash Animation and you've have to figure out how to load it, but you wouldn't need to know how to design it. The PHP, C#, and MySQL would be more relevant.

"Web Designer" would be largely the reverse. You'd need to know CSS backwards and forwards, you'd need some artistic ability, you'd probably leave all of the back-end coding to the Web Developer.

Both people need to work together and should know at least a little bit about each other's jobs and if you can do both, that's fantastic.

I know someone who went to Full Sail and had nothing but positive things about it. He had years of C / Perl / PHP / Python / Java programming experience under his belt before he ever went there, but found his audio/visual/flash/etc skills lacking and said they were great for that.

[cobberas]

Thanks folks for your comments.

They don't really specify whether they're targeting web designers or developers, although perhaps we may infer from the areas of focus that they're leaning more towards designers than developers.

Cheers
cobberas

[Dani]

I think that they are targeting Web Developers but from the IT angle as opposed to the Computer Science angle (i.e. not much theory). From what I understand, they have two programs: one targeting designers and a different one targeting developers. Then they have a third program that is actually a bit of a combination.