Russell Coker <russell@coker.com.au> wrote:
One of the problems here is that some students will invest the time in studying those subjects expecting to gain some benefit other than educational credit. IE they will want to actually learn something useful rather than just get some marks.
If someone does such a course in year 12 next year then the course would have been designed this year if not earlier (they need to get the training written in advance). So a year 12 student in 2014 would finish university no earlier than 2017 and look for work in 2018. It doesn't seem that a product specific training course from 2013 would be that useful in 2018. It would be about as useful as "MS Windows Vista" specific knowledge is right now.
That's why general (rather than product-specific) courses are so important. Students need to be taught the fundamentals, the concepts, the practical skills needed to pick up product-specific details on their own throughout a lifetime of interaction with software.