Re: Where have all the good Usability/UI Courses gone!

Thanks, William, for mentioning the conference tutorials - I should have
shared these with this list a bit sooner. Tutorials (whether at HCI2003 or
other conferences) tend to have around 5-10 participants and are given by
recognised authorities in the field (after peer review of tutorial
proposals). The tutorial presenters generally have given this training
before to industrial clients, albeit at commercial prices.

The small class size ensures an excellent degree of learner attention,
while at the same time the other participants supply an excellent network
for continued learning and collaboration in future.

This is a smaller class size than I might expect for the type of
commercial evening course we lecturers deliver through the university (8 -
18), and of course very much smaller than university teaching classes.

Commercial HCI trainers who are members of the British HCI Group can have
their names added to http://www.bcs-hci.org.uk/consultancy.html or
http://www.bcs-hci.org.uk/commCourse.html . Over the next six months we
plan to develop these pages. Lastly, LTSN's HCI page at
http://www.ics.ltsn.ac.uk/resources/hci/index.html is developing usefully

Many university lecturers are expected, especially at post-92
universities, to bring money into the institution by running short
courses - either as open-access evening classes or bespoke on-site
training for a specific company. Because of deadlines for printed
publicity, it can take a couple of years to get new courses into the
university's short course catalogue (eg http://www.napier.ac.uk/cppd/ ),
but we are always looking for opportunities to launch new courses.
Generally these start as bespoke and get added 18-24 months later.

For example, Sandra Cairncross and I happen to be doing a one-
off "Introduction to HCI" summer school next week in response to one
client's needs, and this will be added to the list of scheduled short
courses in session 2004-5. But we, like other lecturers around the
country, would typically sit down with a client, identify the learning
outcomes, environment, trainees' experience etc and tailor a course to
fit. Universities tend not to be as slick as commercial training companies
(the coffee and pastries are definitely inferior!) although they are
getting better at presenting their services, and certainly the design and
print quality of our course notes has had to improve greatly in recent
years. But HCI lecturers are both experienced at "facilitating learning"
for a variety of skills levels, and are often active researchers.

Hope all this is useful
Tom McEwan
Lecturer, Napier University
HCI2003 Publicity Chair
British HCI Group Comms Chair

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