Work in progress — Evaluation and feedback for web programming curriculum

Leading any curriculum development is always difficult and challenging. A survey of former students and industry professionals is being performed that will help guide the changes necessary to keep our students gainfully employed. Too often, improvements to courses come not through industry experts, but instead through what faculty feel is the best approach, which may or may not be correct. This paper looks at evaluation of curriculum contents, down to project assignments and tools used, and the implementation of new content and objectives. In addition to gathering some demographic information such as job title and location, the 72 questions in the survey ranged from "How frequently do you or others in your company/organization commonly use the following web technologies/languages?" to "How important is teaching Search Engine Optimization (SEO) so that students understand how to obtain better page listings?" to "With the purpose of HTML5 being to reduce the amount of reliance on RIAs and browser plug-ins like Flash, how important do you see Flash development being in the future?" The feedback garnered thus far has been useful in guiding changes in the web programming curriculum and has shown that industry professionals are generally interested in helping guide student learning.