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Whether on our phones, websites, or books, we consistently rely on words and their fonts! From instruction books to course content to educational web content, typography exists everywhere! It wouldn’t be a lie to mention...
The post Typography in Education: Crafting Clear and Readable Communication for Students appeared first on 85ideas.com.
Career in education is one of the most important and difficult ones. But at the same time teachers around the world are overworked and underpaid. There are many factors that affect teachers’ income. In this...
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I’m often asked where to learn web development. The answer varies, of course, and we’ve published a few posts on the topic over the years, the most recent of which was Chris taking a stab at different learning paths in 2020.
The answer doesn’t have to be school. But sometimes it is, and if your goal is to earn a degree in front-end web development from a college or university, there are other questions you probably have. One of those is probably how the heck do I afford tuition? That’s the second most-asked question I get from the students I teach at my little city college. (Well, that and if they can get an extension on an assignment.)
Scholarships! That’s the golden ticket, right? Unlike a loan, a scholarship is money you don’t have to pay back. There are strings attached. You might need to write an essay with your application, demonstrate a certain level of academic success, or even complete the program before the any funds are dispersed.
Good gosh, there are practically hundreds of sites that turn up with a simple online search. The problem is that most of them are aggregate sites littered with ads and affiliate links, many of which busted years ago.
That makes finding a legit source of scholarships like finding a needle in the proverbial haystack. It’s a little easier if your goal is to sign up for some sort of coding bootcamp because those usually offer needs-based discounts up front. But that doesn’t help afford a college degree.
Besides an online search, your best bet for finding scholarships might be on major corporate websites, like Google and Microsoft, both of which offer annually recurring scholarships for a number of programs related to technology.
As great as big companies can be for scholarships, you might find it tough to find a scholarship that’s explicitly for front-end development. That’s because many scholarships are only loosely tied to front-end development. Many of the scholarships I’ve found are more like:
That’s a bummer because you’re essentially applying for a scholarship that’s open to other fields not directly related to front-end development.
And a certain scholarship offered this year might not be offered next year. It all depends on who is doling out the money and how much money they have to give. Often it’s going to be some private foundation, endowment, or small company that offers the most promising scholarships, and it could be a one-time deal. I found that many of the most enticing front-end scholarships ended years ago, but are still popping up all over those pesky aggregate sites that claim to have updated information for the current year.
I went down a few rabbit holes trying to find academic scholarships that specifically say “front-end development” or “web design” in their materials. Again, different scholarships have different strings attached to them and what I found today could be gone tomorrow.
That said, here’s a few (in no particular order) that passed my filters:
| Scholarship | Who it’s for | How much it offers |
|---|---|---|
| BOWEN Web Design Scholarship | Full or part-time students, with a declared major related to web design or development. | $1,500 |
| Chee Web Development Scholarship | Students embarking on a web-related certificate or undergraduate degree. | $1,000 |
| The Web Development of Tomorrow Scholarship | LGBTQ individuals | $1,000 |
| Lounge Lizard Web Design | Students at an accredited school, or accepted to begin school at an accredited school within 6 months of application. | $1,000 |
| Digital Excellence Awards Scholarship | Students under 25 in an accredited school looking for an education in web design, digital marketing, SEO, or computer science. | $1,000 |
| Net Solutions Annual Scholarship | Students enrolled in a four-year college or university in the U.S., U.K., Canada, or Australia. | $2,500 |
There could be more! These were just the ones I found. Link me up to others you know of in the comments and I’ll check ’em out to add to the list.
If you’re willing to apply for scholarships that are less directly tied to front-end development, there are more to consider:
Not attending a college or university? Coding bootcamps are all the rage, or so I hear, and many of them are offered online with discounts and scholarship opportunities. I can’t personlly vouch for each and every bootcamp out there. If you’re interested in taking one — like maybe Fullstack Academy, Udacity, Coding Dojo, or any of the learning paths at Frontend Masters — then it’s worth a quick check for financial help.
Seriously! For all the college and university students I know who are enrolled in a front-end development program, there is scant resourcing available to make their education more affordable — at least ones without stipulations for which school you’re attending or that are directly related to the front-end field.
Part of me is tempted to go on some sort of rant, but instead what I’ll say is this is a ripe area for private individuals and companies to step in and make a difference. Sure, there are lots of ways to “give back” and it doesn’t have to be a scholarship.
But I see a big hole here and I imagine it’s relatively easy for any mid-sized company to hand out $500-$1,000 once a year to promote education. It’s not only good for students and good for the web, but most likely good for the company, too.
Every scholarship I found is either directly tied to front-end development (or web design), or groups front-end development with other loosely-related disciplines. How cool would it be to see scholarships that are specifically for front-end and geared toward front-end disciplines?!
There are so many areas we could support…
…just to name a few.
Finding Front-End Development Scholarships originally published on CSS-Tricks, which is part of the DigitalOcean family. You should get the newsletter.
Qi Theme is a free WordPress theme created by Qode Interactive – an award-winning studio. This theme perfectly combines top speed and performance with a beautiful design.
It comes with 100 demos, allowing you to easily set up any type of website, whether it’s an online store, an artist’s portfolio, or a simple blog. If you can think it up, this theme will help you build it – it will even grant you free access to premium stock photos.
Qi Theme is fully supported by video tutorials as well as an extensive knowledge base, so you’ll always have a place to look for help.
Here we are going to talk about how to make an e-learning app for Android and iOS but before this, it is very important to know why e-learning mobile apps are necessary and how they're so popular in 2021.
As we all know that because of COVID-19, the education system faced several challenges. During these times, the EdTech system came to the rescue of the education sector shutdown. EdTech has made education more accessible and transformed the way students are educated. As the world is going online, online learning portals are a great option to keep students informed and productive.
After looking at SQL's impressive 50-year reign and what we could learn from it, let us now focus on how we can learn it.
Not only is SQL everywhere, but it is also in high demand. A quick search of job boards easily reveals not only that virtually all of the S&P 500 companies are hiring for SQL skills, but that the demand for them is even higher than more 'high-tech' languages like R and Python.
It's no secret that both QuickBooks and TallyPrime software are key dominant players in the Indian market. QuickBooks is a cloud-based accounting software from Intuit, with provisioning for Indian currency, Indian tax regulations, and automatic synchronization of QuickBooks accounting information with the Company’s bank transaction information. The best thing is its UI which is way better and is a monthly payment software, making it more convenient for SMEs. Tally Prime, on the other hand, is basically a one-time payment software and is especially for the Indian market, keeping in mind that the Indian enterprise-level organizations need a regulatory regime.
QuickBooks was founded in 1983, and it has slowly but steadily climbed the ranks in order to become the giant it is today. Although it was founded in 1983, it took about 19 years to release the first version of QuickBooks. But, after the QuickBooks release, it went through a lot of changes and is still changing to this day; its software has evolved, adding more features and functionality. QuickBooks, at present, is available on a wider international scale throughout the globe. Tally, on the other hand, released its new version TallyPrime, which empowers business owners to be more efficient. Like QuickBooks, Tally has also gone through a lot of changes for the past 30 years, and at present, their newest version TallyPrime is on the Indian market.
Quality Sense is back for season two! Did you miss us?
In this episode, Federico invited Fernanda Sesto, a socially-minded Latina entrepreneur, current University of Rochester student, and a former Abstracta team member, to share a bit of what it was like for her to start working in testing at the ripe old age of 18!
Did anybody listen to Peter Thiel? In 2011, the billionaire co-founder of PayPal, dubbed “contrarian investor” by the New York Times, created the Thiel Fellowship. A collection of 24 youngsters under the age of 20 were awarded $100,000 in exchange for dropping out of college to start tech companies.
Thiel said:
I believe you have a bubble whenever you have something that’s overvalued and intensely believed. In education, you have this clear price escalation without incredible improvement in the product. At the same time you have this incredible intensity of belief that this is what people have to do…It seems very similar in some ways to the housing bubble and the tech bubble.
Thiel had struck a raw cultural nerve. For years, as the world reeled and slowly recovered from a financial crisis, the quality of higher education was rapidly degrading while tuition costs were steadily increasing.
As more colleges make the switch to online only in the response to the pandemic, and the “college experience” becomes a relic of a bygone era, one wonders what the future of the university might look like.
Does a college education still improve economic outcomes in any significant way?
For people interested in tech careers, the answer is probably no. A college education produces minimal, if any, value. In effect, the university model, with American student loan debt amounting to $1.6 trillion, seems to do more harm than good.
COVID-19 has taught the world many harsh lessons and forced us all to reckon with difficult conclusions. But it has also shown us the promise and potential we might have otherwise passed without comment.
According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the 2019 median salary for a web developer comes to $73,760 per year, or $35.46 per hour, with no former work experience in related occupations required. The bureau lists an associate’s degree as the typical entry-level education, which, at most colleges, amounts to 5-6 semesters—considerably smaller investment than a four year degree.
But with readily available—and free—online courses in WordPress, HTML, CSS, PHP, and JavaScript, and the ubiquity of certification programs and “boot camps,” even an associate’s degree seems like overkill. When anyone, from any background, can launch a $70,000 per year career with no more experience than a few free courses available through any public library, we have either entered an era of unparalleled prosperity—or The Twilight Zone.
Should any web developer decide to pick up full stack development skills, or expand into general software engineering, the median salary jumps up to six figures. And this is before we get to the new frontiers of big data and “the cloud.”
Instead of thinking in monotone sentiments like “learn to code,” let’s imagine a generation raised under the banner of learn how to learn.
“The computer was a tool,” says John Dorner, IT coordinator for a USDA grant program, and WordPress developer. Starting his career as a 4-H program leader and agricultural extension agent for the University of Georgia in the 1980s, Dorner discovered computing as a shortcut to efficiency.
It wasn’t so easy to learn computers in those days. Tasks any high-schooler would consider common today required deep knowledge of how hardware and software worked together. There were no hard drives. Dorner had to employ two floppy disks, one with the operating system and application and one with his data, in order to create a spreadsheet.
“Writing code without the Internet was…interesting,” Dorner recalls. Learning PHP and MySQL from a recliner, balancing a laptop on his lap, and a book on the arm of the chair, Dorner demonstrates that the will to learn can exist outside of the classroom.
During our conversation over Google Meet, we talked about the alternatives available to people young and old, and from virtually any socio-economic background, who are interested in pursuing careers in IT or development.
Before opting for an associate’s degree, there are shorter duration programs available. Boot camps and certification programs provide rigorous course work and leave their students with some experience and a portfolio—and no student debt.
Dorner says:
Most web agencies would hire people if [they’ve] got a certificate, a portfolio, or some way to prove [they] have the skills…That’s more important than a full degree. Now, if you want to work at IBM, they might require a Bachelor’s or Master’s Degree. And there is a lot you can learn in those [full degree] programs. But somebody coming out of [community college or a boot camp] can get a good job and something starting.
In addition to free courses online, Dorner suggests that WordPress can be a powerful accelerant to tackling bigger concepts in web development. The WordPress path to web mastery works in “layers.”
“WordPress is a good starting point,” Dorner says. “[You] can do a lot in WordPress without knowing any code.” Once one has achieved a level of comfort with the WordPress interface, he can start adding custom CSS rules. From there, he can try his hand at child themes. And before long, full themes and plugins.
“The more you hack, the more you learn.”
In addition to learning the WordPress interface, the learner is being exposed to deeper concepts like web servers, open source philosophy, and version control.
What is left for the universities to cover?
Everybody needs to have some general education, Dorner replies. Basic math, science, and some of the humanities help to round out a liberal education. Beyond the general education, there are life skills and experience that must happen oustide of the classroom.
Dorner not only works in IT, but creates jobs as well. During the hiring process, I asked, what’s the most important criteria an applicant must meet?
It’s very important to be a self-directed, lifelong learner. I hired someone [recently]…[She] had the minimum requirements, but she had the initiative to learn something new. She was self-taught, went out and learned the stuff, and was able to solve the problem. That was more important to me than [the credentials].
The pathways into the tech field are now baked into society itself. Every kid who learns how to Google for information is building a working knowledge of SEO. Every kid who touches an iPhone learns the fundamentals of UX. And so forth.
The question for the coming years is whether or not the university model will meet these kids on the journey to careers in tech with something unique to offer them, or if the kids can get there well enough on their own.
WordPress university was always online.
Virtual reality and augmented reality, along with AI and automation, are transforming the lives of people both at home and in the workplace.
VR, which is all about offering humans a completely computerized, digital world, and AR technology, which is about building computer graphics that can be viewed in a normal environment, have now been used and adapted at the industry level as well as for entertainment purposes. For example, in an online business, such as one selling furniture, the AR application helps shoppers visualize how a particular piece of furniture will look in their living room without having to actually buy it or go into a store.
The global shift to home isolation has unique implications for public education. The era of slow and steady plans to virtualize education was given a donkey kick by this virus and the quarantine, and here's what I've observed.
I'm one of the directors on my local school board, and part of a group of technologists called in to discuss and help with “distance learning” and implementing it in our district. Though some of our problems are unique to our area, many of these problems are facing schools around the country, and possibly worldwide.
Nowadays, the majority of parents don't know about programming education for children. Meanwhile, there are a set of free games that help kids to learn how to develop "simple applications". Such learning games can be played even by children even three years of age. They can learn about topics like:
In this article, I'm going to review three games that can get kids to start development while having fun.
Many years back (well, five or so, but that's an eternity in technical worlds), I used to be the editor of the mobile channel of a developer website. This was when app-building was the hottest thing in town, and well, Objective-C, the default language for building iOS apps, was looking ancient.
Then in 2014, Apple announced, Swift, a new modern option for building apps in the Apple ecosystem, and with an increasing amount of cross-platform, server-side support, it was always a language I had a lot of hope for and kept a keen eye on.
The team here at WPMU DEV is also the same team behind CampusPress, which provides hosting and WordPress services for schools and universities.
Yesterday, we released our latest product, a flexible and accessible WordPress theme for schools and education.
This is the first theme that our team has created that truly incorporates everything that the Gutenberg block editor has to offer – such as reusable blocks, editor styles, content groups, and customizing default blocks.
No use in sugarcoating it, it wasn’t as fast or as easy of a project as we hoped. But the end result was well worth it. We thought we’d share some of the why and how of what we created here. It should be useful to anyone choosing, designing, or developing new WordPress themes in the future.
We work with tens of thousands of schools and colleges the world over. Everything from student blogs and ePortfolios, news sites, and on up to the main website of large universities. See bulletin.hds.harvard.edu and charlestonsouthern.edu as just two examples.
Not every site needs (or can afford) custom design and development. But our customers have three main, often competing, requirements:
It is pretty easy to create or find themes that meet one or two of these requirements but ensuring all three, that’s a whole next-level challenge. While we have some work to do (more on that below), we’re certainly happy with the results.
Before beginning development, we spent a good amount of time deciding on the specific features we wanted to include and then looking through the different frameworks and tools out there to build off of. There is no reason to completely start from scratch.
Our focus was on finding the best existing tools and frameworks that would help us with our accessibility, performance, and user-friendly goals.
As a foundation, we decided on UnderStrap which itself is based on the ‘Underscores’ theme by Automattic and the Bootstrap framework by Twitter. This is a pretty popular framework and it is easy to see why. Starting with UnderStrap has decreased development time and helped significantly with our accessibility goals.
We also knew that we wanted to rely heavily on the WordPress customizer for all of the different theme options and settings. We fell in love with the Kirki framework and leveraged heavily quite a few of the controls it offers.
Our theme makes use of CSS Variables which also made it easier and faster to develop (with much less JavaScript for improved performance). It is worth noting, this does require a special script to work in IE11 (which quite a few of our customers do use) and not every feature can be used in IE11.
For the typeface options, we started out with making many of the free Google Fonts available in the customizer. But we needed to load all variants and styles (bold, italic, etc.) which can be heavy to load, so we opted to not include Google Fonts at all and landed on adding only free Variable Fonts instead. There is enough variation there with modern fonts to give end-users great options to choose from.
Last, our school customers loooove icons. Iconmoon made it easy for us to select from free icons (but we tried not to include too many so that we don’t slow the site down or overwhelm the user). As a result, it easy to add and customize icons for menus and in content blocks.
On that note, we’re particularly excited about new hooks in WordPress 5.4 which will allow us to add custom icon options to Menus in the Customizer. As of now, we force users to go to Appearance > Menus if they want to manage icons, even though they can do everything else with Menus right in the customizer. This new WordPress core feature will be a big win for usability.
Working with this theme has also been the first significant experience many on our team have had with the Gutenberg block editor. We’ve gotten addicted to some of the lesser-known features which we have enhanced with the theme too.
Reusable blocks are incredibly useful for any block or content that repeats more than once across a site. You can update it once, and those changes will be applied everywhere the block appears on a site.
With our theme, once you create a reusable block, we’ve used the filter in WordPress core to show a new main Reusable Blocks menu item in the WordPress dashboard too.
Our customers use Reusable Blocks for a variety of reasons, including footer content, creating ‘mega menus’, and important notices across multiple pages.
Using ‘Content Groups’ in the block editor is what really makes full page builder features possible. You can easily make ‘rows’ or combine blocks and choose a separate background color for the group to give it separation and a more customized look.
One of our favorite features of ‘Gutenberg’ is that theme authors can make it so that the back-end editor displays the content with the same styles as the front-end. A true ‘WYSIWYG’ experience, with background colors, fonts, and buttons all showing the same when editing as it does when viewing the site live.
However, for anyone developing themes, we found that we basically needed to apply styles twice as the HTML in the editor is different than the front end. This also meant we kept having to tweak and make changes twice as we improved the theme during development. It has sort of resulted in an ongoing battle. We expect that documentation and implementation of editor styles will continue to improve as more theme authors take advantage of it.
One of the features that we spent a lot of time on was with giving users flexibility on choosing colors, but still enforcing accessible contrast ratios between text and background colors.
Here’s an example of how it works:
As background colors change, we change the color of the text. We also use chosen colors to then provide additional accent colors that can be used in block settings for backgrounds, buttons, quotes, etc.
While most accessibility tools are more about finding accessibility issues, our goal is more about prevention before the problems occur. We know that accessibility is a continuum, meaning it can always be improved. As such, we will continue to build on accessible design options in our themes in products.
We built this theme to be the parent for all of our future custom theme projects. We’ll continue to add new custom blocks and integrations with popular plugins that our customers use.
We also are working on making Reusable Blocks that can be shared across sites in a Multisite Network.
We’re still doing some real-world testing in hopes, if there is demand, that we will eventually submit it to WordPress.org as well.
In the meantime, if you know of a school that needs a website and would like to use this theme, please send them our way! ;)
Whether you’re first entering the world of web design or own a well-established agency, one thing applies to all: you can always learn more. That’s what makes online courses so fabulous. You can learn at your own pace and pick and choose the topics you want to delve deeper into.
Instead of having to hunt around for great web design courses to take, we’ve put together a list of some of our favorite online courses. Each of the following will help you to become a more solid web designer, expand your skill set, and/or improve your business direction.
Unlimited Downloads: 500,000+ Web Templates, Icon Sets, Themes & Design Assets
Become a real expert in web design by taking this master course on Udemy. Instructor Joe Natoli walks you through UX principles for creating better web designs that work for visitors and customers.
Here’s another great course on Udemy. The instructor this time is Brad Hussey and he breaks down all the details of what it takes to become a full-stack developer. This covers it all from front-end design to back-end programming.
If you’re new to the world of web design, you’ll greatly benefit from this web design for beginners course by Brad Schiff. It shows you how to create HTML5, CSS3, and responsive design in real-world examples.
This fantastic online course on Pluralsight is an obvious choice for expanding your web design skills.
Another course you might want to consider is this breakdown of user experience in web design put together by Chris Nodder. It’s just under two hours long and aimed at beginners, but even pros could use a refresher now and then.
Here’s another beginner-level course, this time a full intro to web design and development. It consists of about three and a half hours of instruction that offer in-depth exploration of topics you need to know to advance your skills.
For creating a better workflow for running a web design agency or business, this mini-course is a sure bet.
Responsive design is a must nowadays. Learn more than just the basics here in this just-over-an-hour long advanced course.
If you’re interested in the business side of things, you won’t want to miss this course all about careers in web design and development.
The last course on this list is one from Treehouse. It focuses exclusively on front-end web development and covers HTML, CSS, Javascript, and more.
Hopefully you now have the tools at your disposal to further your web design education. Completing the above ten online courses will further your skills and help you take the next step in your career. Be sure to also check out our extensive library of tutorials to add to your toolbox. Best of luck in the effort!
Cover photo courtesy of ShotStash
Whether it was the millions of users left vulnerable by Fortnite, or hackers gaining access to Dunkin’ customer accounts, 2019 has already seen some of the worst data breaches to date. To combat these types of attacks and vulnerabilities, organizations must be more cognizant of their security, and embrace a DevSecOps approach. And to do so, it is imperative that they provide the proper education and training for every facet of the organization.
You may also enjoy: 10 DevSecOps Implementation Principles
But it is important to note when educating organizations about security that some practices and technologies should be encouraged, while others should be avoided. These teachings need to be tailored for different audiences as needed, and new ways of learning and fitting into a DevSecOps scope should be explored in great detail.
Artificial intelligence is one of the most significant pieces of technology to emerge in the 21st Century. Today, it’s never more than a few meters away — whether you’re at home watching Netflix or in your car on the way to work.
It’s hard not to think of an industry that isn’t ripe for technological innovation — especially when it comes to the delicate and vital topics of healthcare and education.
