Four groups of women studying for an NVQ in Media and IT skills have undertaken a crash course in internet skills, taking them from their first experience of browsing the web to web page design and site maintenance in 12 hours over 4 days. During this time the separate groups have created their own homepages, made their group sites, and integrated them into a collective site for the course.

Unlike much computer training, the course has avoided platform or software dependence – so that, having learnt the fundamentals governing HTML pages and web-based graphics, students have a foundation from which to learn for themselves on different computers with different software when they leave the course. In the second stage of the course students will work collaboratively to design a trial web site for an organisation as a large-scale project. The course is part of a collaboration between the Multimedia Enabling Technologies Group (METg) and the Community Arts organisation, Living Archive.

To view their work so far: http://oiler.open.ac.uk/webskills98/