Challenges with Web Application Development Curriculum
Challenges with Web Application Development Curriculum

Summary/Abstract: Teaching courses in Web application development pose their own unique challenges. Technology in this area keeps changing at a rapid pace. Topics that were relevant a semester or a year ago become obsolete. The paper examines the technological changes that happened in the context of the Advanced Web Application Development course, MET CS701. The course primarily covers Rich Internet Application development using ActionScript and Flex, AJAX, GWT, JQuery, Silverlight, and JavaFX. The course started as an on-campus course during the Fall of 2009. The online version of the course was offered the following semester. The first version of the course covered ActionScript and Flex, AJAX, GWT, Silverlight, and JavaFX. Since the contents for the online class were developed before the course launched, the contents and the versions of the software used were already outdated. Students expect the current topics to be covered and sometimes gives rise to comments that they are not being taught the latest trends in the field. Even with the on-campus versions of the class, keeping up with the changes for every course offering poses a big challenge. It is as if a new course is being developed each time. In this paper, we examine the topics that were covered and how the material changed over time.

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