Web engineering: new discipline, new educational challenges

The WWW has turned into a development and run-time environment for large-scale and complex applications. Such sophisticated applications are being deployed in increasing numbers without having been developed according to appropriate methodologies and quality standards. The main reason for this ad hoc development philosophy is the lack of specialised training/education on the web engineering subject domain. This domain/discipline is new, still immature and has recently started getting the attention of researchers, developers, and other major players in the web-based application development market and training market. There is now justifiable and increasing concern about the manner in which students and lifelong learners are well educated and trained in this new discipline. It’s also only one year ago that few universities have started providing special courses on this discipline and offer seminars to lifelong learners. The Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at National Technical University of Athens (NTUA) decided to tackle the didactic need on this subject field, by offering to its post-graduate students one semester course called “Internet Publishing”. In this paper an overview of the course, its web-enriched delivery method as well as the quantitative and qualitative results extracted after an evaluation study which occurred during the autumn semester 1999–2000, are presented.