[game_edu] Ad Hoc committee

[Yusuf Pisan]

Doing accreditation right is difficult and resource intensive. Doing it 
badly (or lightly) is not worth it.

I do not see the that IGDA has sufficient resources to conduct a serious 
accreditation at this point. For me, accreditation would have to include 
site visits, examining course outlines carefully, looking at sample 
student projects, and talking with both students and teachers. This gets 
expensive quickly.

There are many different academic programs. The advice from "industry" 
is not yet uniform, and it may never be. I would like to see IGDA remain 
in advisory capacity, collecting examples of best practice, or just 
successful case studies, until the field matures further.

I was heavily involved in  updating the Curriculum Framework from the 
2003 to the 2008 version. It is all volunteer time, and volunteer time 
is hard to come by. I know lots of people who did not provide feedback 
because there were many urgent things that they needed to do as part of 
their job. Accreditation would be orders of magnitude harder, very time 
consuming and resource intensive.

I'd like to suggest a way forward. Can we come up with a set of 
'graduate skills and attributes' (my university's jargon) that we expect 
   a student who has graduated from a "games program"?

My bet is that even before we can answer this question, we first have to 
expand on different kinds of games programs

	Bsc in Game Development
	Bsc in Game Programming
	BA in Game Studies
	BA in Animation & Games
	...

Let's work out what are the subbaranches first, then list what we expect 
graduates to know and then we can talk about accreditation.

Cheers,

Yusuf

-- 
A/Professor Yusuf Pisan
Faculty of Information Technology
University of Technology, Sydney
http://staff.it.uts.edu.au/~ypisan/


Burke, Robin wrote:

> (I apologize if this message appears twice. My previous attempt did not 

> appear on the list – I think because of an address mismatch issue. 

> Trying again.)

> 

>  

> 

> I really do not understand why this issue keeps moving forward despite 

> the total lack of publicly-stated interest from the SIG membership. I've 

> not heard word one in support of this idea on the mailing list, yet 

> according to this email, it has already been decided that such a stamp 

> of approval will be created, the only question being what the 

> requirements will be. There's been "a large offline discussion." By 

> whom? Why is such an important topic unable to be discussed in the only 

> public forum that we have as a SIG?

> 

>  

>