It's true that I was just a step ahead of the students. However, I was using course materials designed by people who knew the material, I had veteran TA's (who could answer the questions), and I do have over 30 years of teaching experience. This was an advantage when teaching this class. I could figure out when the lecture slides weren't enough for me to understand, so I added more to them to make them understandable for the students. My expertise is in teaching: Figuring out how to make things learnable by students.
In the end, the Web programming part was only a portion of the course -- the rest of it was on design and development process, architecture, and issues like accessibility, all of which I am more familiar with. (For example, because I'm an old Smalltalk programmer, I can explain where MVC came from and strengths/weaknesses better than many.)
The course evaluations were very positive. I think the class worked.
It's true that I was just a step ahead of the students. However, I was using course materials designed by people who knew the material, I had veteran TA's (who could answer the questions), and I do have over 30 years of teaching experience. This was an advantage when teaching this class. I could figure out when the lecture slides weren't enough for me to understand, so I added more to them to make them understandable for the students. My expertise is in teaching: Figuring out how to make things learnable by students.
In the end, the Web programming part was only a portion of the course -- the rest of it was on design and development process, architecture, and issues like accessibility, all of which I am more familiar with. (For example, because I'm an old Smalltalk programmer, I can explain where MVC came from and strengths/weaknesses better than many.)
The course evaluations were very positive. I think the class worked.