Our industry needs quickly-changeable courses, says private training college
Global private training institution Qantm has said that Universities may not be the best way of teaching games knowledge because of the slowness at which they can update their courses.
"Mainstream universities have a very inherent problem with updating their curriculum, because they have to go through updated validation processes and such that can take up to three years," said Qantm's marketing man Nic Oliver in our first Education Spotlight, uploaded to the Develop website today.
"But our course structure, the way we run things, means that if something new is released tomorrow we could have it in our course in a matter of weeks."
The piece covers Qantm's course offerings, as well as finding out what it's doing to make sure its courses are relevant to the games industry, and also reveals how the college is taking its courses into schools in order to promote learning about digital media creation from an early age.
For more on the college, check out the article here.
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While I can see a place for Qantm and the like, the quality controls that the university system provides should not be categorised merely as slow. Furthermore, our own experience at Newport is that the content and delivery are changeable on a day to day basis, only resource acquisition takes time (and money), which is where open source, freeware and initiatives, such as Microsoft's XNA and Sony's PSP Dev kit offerings make a difference. To say that universities take three years to change anything is misleading and wrong. For major changes, which are increasingly involving consultation with industry, only a few months are required. This ongoing "incremental development" is much faster than the generational changes in industry that the arrival of next gen consoles has forced upon gaming. The principals of GOOD game design have not changed anywhere nearly as fast.
