It was interesting reading your post James because it seems that TAFEs across the country may vary widely despite courses supposedly being drawn from a national based syllabus and providing national accreditation.
Related to this, I reckon one of the biggest problems causing a lack of standards in Web design education is a lack of collaboration. Each facilitator/lecturor is re-inventing the wheel with activities and resources largely due to IP restrictions within their workplace. In reality, many facilitators just end up re-using the same resources that's been used for the last 5 years because on their own they don't have time to update both their own skills and the resources they use.
The ironic thing is that (nearly) all the best info on Web Design topics is being shared freely by professional designers on their blogs/sites! ... I mean, with excellent sites like http://webdesignfromscratch.com/ and http://maxdesign.com.au/ published by professionals, what is the role of an educator?
My take is that if lecturors and facilitators were able to collaboratively create and update flexible learning pathways from all the great free stuff out there, we'd be in a better position to help the uptake of standards in Web design education.
(Plug) : 'cause of this, I've started setting up a WebDesign Wikibook over at:
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Web_Design
Really it's just ordering and grouping all the great resources out there created by you professionals into some sort of learning pathway with ideas for activities... Feel free to contribute :)
--
Michael Nelson
http://liveandletlearn.net/
