The Open Web Education Alliance

There are a number of initiatives for developing a curriculum that can be taught in schools, colleges and anywhere else that wants a formal approach to learning about the web. For example WaSP InterAct, Opera, Yahoo, Adobe and WOW have all created their own training programs that aim to help teach best practices and web standards.

Joining these initiatives is a new incubator group, The Open Web Education Alliance (OWEA) which was recently announced by the W3C.

The mission of the Open Web Education Alliance Incubator Group, part of the Incubator Activity, is to help enhance and standardize the architecture of the World Wide Web by facilitating the highest quality standards and best practice based education for future generations of Web professionals through such activities as

• fostering open communication channels for knowledge transfer
• curriculum sharing between corporate entities, educational institutions, Web professionals, and students.

See the charter for more information.

I think this is a great initiative which, if all goes according to plan, should help students everywhere providing them with clear advice on how best to achieve real world problems. I know the W3C can take a long time to make any changes (HTML5 will reach proposed recommendation in 2022) so there is some risk that by the time we see anything useful it will already be out of date, but something is better than nothing.

Do you agree or do you think there are already too many courses and qualifications for this to make any difference?