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Having done some work for a school that's jumped through these hoops, I believe that it's a different definition of "approved." It's not "choose one of these cu

Having done some work for a school that's jumped through these hoops, I believe that it's a different definition of "approved." It's not "choose one of these curricula we made up and do that," it's "show us your complete curriculum and defend how this makes a complete program."

iskander 9y ago
The response times on approval can be pretty terrible and you get peppered with a lot of dumb requests by reviewers who don't actually understand the material. (I grew up around my parents' vocational school, board of education interactions looked totally insane)
- kowdermeister 9y ago
  This. I work at a coding bootcamp and last week we decided to include CSS Grids in the syllabus for the advanced HTML/CSS week and this week we are practicing it. This would never be possible if we needed our syllabus accredited.
  - brians 9y ago
    I’ve never heard of them stopping you from teaching something extra. Does this mean you dropped something to make room for grids?
    - kowdermeister 9y ago
      In my country you can't function like a normal school if your syllabus needs to be accredited and it's not easy to change it. We didn't really drop anything, an extra day appeared because they were already better prepared before starting the course with basic materials.
      - cbhl 9y ago
        When I went to a university, they got around this by making the syllabi as vague as humanly possible. They even would have a spare course code in each department which was just "whatever the professor feels like teaching, and if it's popular we'll turn it into a real course". Syllabi would avoid specifying the exact languages/frameworks/technologies taught in class.
        sekh60 9y ago
        We had something like that at UToronto Scarborough campus in philosophy. We had independent study course codes which were fourth year course codes where a student or small group of students could work with a prof to develop a custom course. Was amusing in that I think when I started studying there they only had I think four codes, but a friend of mine was there an extra two years and had taken everything upper level basically and they had to make new course codes for him.
        andrewem 9y ago
        My university (in the United States) had a course code like this, except that it was allowed to be repeated so you could take it a number of times under the same course code.
        mkopinsky 9y ago
        UPenn has that. I took CIS 399 ("Special Topics in Computer Science") once as "Unix/Linux Skills" and once as a Python course. From googling I see that it's also been offered as "The Art of Recursion", "Open Source Software Development", and other titles. It is a half-credit course, i.e. half of a normal course.
      - eternalban 9y ago
        I don't see the problem. A syllabus -- per dictionary.com, "an outline or other brief statement of the main points of a discourse, the subjects of a course of lectures, the contents of a curriculum, etc." -- is required by a governing authority that presumably has an interest in what citizen/subject (per your local regime) are being taught. This seems legitimate in the general case. Your syllabus can be "unit-n: overview of current layout technologies for www browsers". Problem solved, no?
        adrianratnapala 9y ago
        This kind of vaguness must certainly be tolerated for established universities and other parts of the traditional pantheon in any given jurisdiction. But, depending on jurisdiction, new schools and small schools might well be given no such wiggle room.
  - throwawayjava 9y ago
    > This would never be possible if we needed our syllabus accredited. Good thing you don't need your syllabus accredited to have an approved curriculum (and in fact not even sure there's such a thing?) Also, accredited institutions make small changes to syllabi (such as the one you mentioned) all the time. (e: Just noticed your comment down-thread, and now assume you're not in the USA. So edit, prepend "In the USA" to my comment. Relevant at least to the article I guess.)
- fredleblanc 9y ago
  On timing — absolutely. It puts the old time-estimation adage of "take a developer's estimate and triple it" to shame.
- awinder 9y ago
  What’s even more worse is people being defrauded of time and money by what amounts to at best an accidental scam. The stakes are high enough that there is arguably an appropriate level of rigor in certification
- dilemma 9y ago
  So what? That's how the world works. You don't get a free pass because you can code.
jinfiesto 9y ago
I've also done work for a for profit school. The issue with approval (as far as I can see) is that it focuses on easily checkable items like "do you have lesson plans" and less on important intangibles like "does your curriculum make any sense."
- eli 9y ago
  Still seems like that'd be better than nothing.

iskander 9y ago

The response times on approval can be pretty terrible and you get peppered with a lot of dumb requests by reviewers who don't actually understand the material. (I grew up around my parents' vocational school, board of education interactions looked totally insane)

kowdermeister 9y ago
This. I work at a coding bootcamp and last week we decided to include CSS Grids in the syllabus for the advanced HTML/CSS week and this week we are practicing it. This would never be possible if we needed our syllabus accredited.
- brians 9y ago
  I’ve never heard of them stopping you from teaching something extra. Does this mean you dropped something to make room for grids?
  - kowdermeister 9y ago
    In my country you can't function like a normal school if your syllabus needs to be accredited and it's not easy to change it. We didn't really drop anything, an extra day appeared because they were already better prepared before starting the course with basic materials.
    - cbhl 9y ago
      When I went to a university, they got around this by making the syllabi as vague as humanly possible. They even would have a spare course code in each department which was just "whatever the professor feels like teaching, and if it's popular we'll turn it into a real course". Syllabi would avoid specifying the exact languages/frameworks/technologies taught in class.
      - sekh60 9y ago
        We had something like that at UToronto Scarborough campus in philosophy. We had independent study course codes which were fourth year course codes where a student or small group of students could work with a prof to develop a custom course. Was amusing in that I think when I started studying there they only had I think four codes, but a friend of mine was there an extra two years and had taken everything upper level basically and they had to make new course codes for him.
        andrewem 9y ago
        My university (in the United States) had a course code like this, except that it was allowed to be repeated so you could take it a number of times under the same course code.
        mkopinsky 9y ago
        UPenn has that. I took CIS 399 ("Special Topics in Computer Science") once as "Unix/Linux Skills" and once as a Python course. From googling I see that it's also been offered as "The Art of Recursion", "Open Source Software Development", and other titles. It is a half-credit course, i.e. half of a normal course.
    - eternalban 9y ago
      I don't see the problem. A syllabus -- per dictionary.com, "an outline or other brief statement of the main points of a discourse, the subjects of a course of lectures, the contents of a curriculum, etc." -- is required by a governing authority that presumably has an interest in what citizen/subject (per your local regime) are being taught. This seems legitimate in the general case. Your syllabus can be "unit-n: overview of current layout technologies for www browsers". Problem solved, no?
      - adrianratnapala 9y ago
        This kind of vaguness must certainly be tolerated for established universities and other parts of the traditional pantheon in any given jurisdiction. But, depending on jurisdiction, new schools and small schools might well be given no such wiggle room.
- throwawayjava 9y ago
  > This would never be possible if we needed our syllabus accredited. Good thing you don't need your syllabus accredited to have an approved curriculum (and in fact not even sure there's such a thing?) Also, accredited institutions make small changes to syllabi (such as the one you mentioned) all the time. (e: Just noticed your comment down-thread, and now assume you're not in the USA. So edit, prepend "In the USA" to my comment. Relevant at least to the article I guess.)
fredleblanc 9y ago
On timing — absolutely. It puts the old time-estimation adage of "take a developer's estimate and triple it" to shame.
awinder 9y ago
What’s even more worse is people being defrauded of time and money by what amounts to at best an accidental scam. The stakes are high enough that there is arguably an appropriate level of rigor in certification
dilemma 9y ago
So what? That's how the world works. You don't get a free pass because you can code.

jinfiesto 9y ago

I've also done work for a for profit school. The issue with approval (as far as I can see) is that it focuses on easily checkable items like "do you have lesson plans" and less on important intangibles like "does your curriculum make any sense."

eli 9y ago
Still seems like that'd be better than nothing.