Problems of learning Website Designing in Tertiary Institutions in Nigeria and Solutions

By resolving challenges with the aid of an instructor or classmate, the student can learn to resolve similar issues without assistance

Students face certain challenges that are related to the nature of the learning, but also to the evolving technology surrounding web page development.

Websites can be accessed via a public Internet Protocol (IP) network, such as the Internet, or a private local area network (LAN), by a uniform resource locator (URL) that identifies the site. 

Websites can be a personal website, a corporate website for a company, a government website, an organization website, etc. Websites are typically dedicated to a particular topic or purpose, ranging from entertainment and social networking to providing news and education. 

All publicly accessible websites collectively constitute the World Wide Web, while private websites, such as a company's website for its employees, are typically part of an intranet (Graf, 2006). 

Web pages, which are the building blocks of websites, are documents, typically composed in plain text interspersed with formatting instructions of Hypertext Markup Language (HTML, XHTML).

Challenges have the potential to be both obstacles and opportunities for the classroom. Certainly, they can impede progress and induce frustration, anxiety, and attrition among students. Yet, challenges are also an important element of learning, contributing to student motivation and satisfaction. 

They set the stage for “teachable moments”; in other words, conceptual conflict induced by a challenge can lead to a restructuring of beliefs and the assimilation of new ideas. They can spur help seeking, certain forms of which are a valuable skill for learning (Ali, et al., 2007). 

By resolving challenges with the aid of an instructor or classmate, the student can learn to resolve similar issues without assistance. Help seeking can lead to collaborative problem solving, benefiting the helper and the observer as well as the help seeker.

In this regards we seek to explore the full range of challenges faced when learning web development specifically on challenges encountered when learning to manipulate HTML, CSS, and JavaScript code. It will identify the computational concepts that underlie these challenges. 

Types of web design

The purpose of different types of web design is to make best use of the existing technologies to create eye-catching websites, serving the very purpose of their conception. Two of the different styles of web design available today are static and dynamic web design (Dorn, 2010).

Static web design – Static web pages are often HTML documents stored as files in the file system and made available by the web server over HTTP (nevertheless URLs ending with ".html" are not always static). However, loose interpretations of the term could include web pages stored in a database, and could even include pages formatted using a template and served through an application server, as long as the page served is unchanging and presented essentially as stored. Static web pages are suitable for the contents that never or rarely need to be updated, though modern web template systems are changing this. Maintaining large numbers of static pages as files can be impractical without automated tools, such as static site generators.

Dynamic web design- A dynamic web page is then reloaded by the user or by a computer program to change some variable content. The updating information could come from the server, or from changes made to that page's DOM. This may or may not truncate the browsing history or create a saved version to go back to, but a dynamic web page update using Ajax technologies will neither create a page to go back to, nor truncate the web browsing history forward of the displayed page. 

Learning Web Design

Methods of learning website designing

Teaching Styles - Teaching style can vary from one course to another. But regards to technology teaching, two styles are common: Explorative and learning by doing. Bradley (2003) explained about these two styles of learning

Explorative learning - This form of learning is similar to the most scientific re-search (e.g., scientists, practitioners) attempts to find new ways of doing things or of overcoming an existing problem. OSS systems viewed by GNU developers as scientific knowledge to be shared among mankind. Larry Wall started Perl be-cause he ran into a problem he couldn’t solve with existing tools, and he wanted to explore a way of doing things better.

Leaning by doing - In this form of learning, the learners want to deepen their understanding of a certain tasks by actually engaging in practical tasks that allow them to apply their existing knowledge and to perfect their skills.

Use of software tool – The use of software tool expose the students to few programming concepts thus more of teaching theory may be helpful in this case.

PROBLEMS OF LEARNING WEBSITE DESIGNING IN TERTIARY INSTITUTION IN NIGERIA 

Students face certain challenges that are related to the nature of the learning, but also to the evolving technology surrounding web page development. Writers in the technology field express different views about the factors that challenge the learning of web design among students. Rode (2004) for example outlined four factors that make it difficult for web designer to create web applications:

• Abundance of technologies and standards
• Inadequate technologies and integration between technologies
• Inconsistent implementation of standards
• Differences in end user platforms

Overlapping terms commonly lead to confusion, and may affect the selection of content when designing the structure of web design courses. Dynamic web design may include a wide range of topics that can be classified under “Interactive” and vise versa. In these instances the simple task of selecting a name for a web design course may lead to confusion as the possibility exists that it will not actively reflect the true content of the course. 

SOLUTIONS

1. Content analysis technique should be applied in learning website design because it makes valid and reliable inferences “from texts (or other meaningful matter) to the contexts in use.
2. Thematic unit of analysis, which can flexibly range from a single sentence to multiple paragraphs were can be selected. 
3. Codes should be developed inductively from the data for easy imputation.
4. Help-seeking can also be used to solve the problems of learning website designing. Students should seek help from experts or their predecessors when a problem is encountered.

Content analysis should be applied when learning web design in order to overcome some of the problems associated with it. Student should develop confidence and motivation for learning web development.