Tertiary Institutions In South Australia Out Of Touch

At the beginning of this year I decided to enrol in a Graphic Design & Advertising course at a major South Australian Training provider. My expectations were high, and I was really looking forward to learning a whole heap of new stuff to further my own business. Unfortunately this was not to be, and instead I found myself locked into a course which seemed to be on a lot of levels, outdated. I am sure most people would agree that today technology makes up a huge part of our lives and as such, it would be reasonable to expect a design school with a course focused on graphic design and advertising to cover the electronic forms of these at a very early stage. Once again, I was to be disappointed. For the entire first half of the year, and even into the second part, the majority of our practical training comprised of cutting up paper and pasting up artwork the old way. Naturally I found this incredibly annoying, and in the end put it down to the fact that a large majority of the lecturers had limited computing skills. Now don't get me wrong, some of them were particularly good and very knowledgeable but as I later found out, these were the ones that came from industry recently or were still working. The other lecturers on the other hand, which seem to have been working as lecturers at the college for the last 20 - 30 years, seemed to me to have no idea about current trends and modern work flows. Of course, like most arrogant teachers they had a defence, it was as they saw it, about fundamentals. I can appreciate this, however when we did finally did use computers they were of very little help, in fact on most occasions, we had to work things out for ourselves! Now, if Adelaide and South Australia want to loose their reputation for being the backwards state, they might want to consider adopting a much more forward teaching faculty within their colleges!