Game Design course prospects

Personally I think the idea would be great, and appeal to alot of people, but only if you teach current generation stuff. Teaching people how to make games developed for the last generation of visuals and gameplay is a good start, but I guess it's totally up for debate.

Last generation game design would be fine, and would be much easier to create for, where as current generation would be more useful.

If there is a hard game design prospect, the best way to do a game design course would be to actually have the class develop content for a specific game engine, as a group(for example, making a game where your character has to drive a car through all the rings to win the game, doesn't have to be complicated to the point of narrative and plot).

The blender engine may be ok, but I feel it could be pretty sub par compared to an actual engine. Many games come with a software development kit that allows people to create their own content, the most well known is the Unreal Tournament series of games. The games are built on modding and user created content, and the ediitng tools are by far the best, and the easiest to learn. The good part, is that if you for example purchased a copy of Unreal Tournament 3, it comes with the full suite of tools used to create custom content that the game developers themselves use. The only difference is, you don't have a licence to sell your mod or game you create within it.

However, you can use the games default librarys of content (textures, models sounds etc) to make maps and levels, but if you want the class to be able to create content for the engine, you'd probably have to look at another kind of 3d modelling package, one that is assured to work with the engine. Introdducing that also means you'd have to have someone who could teach that specific 3d suite such as 3DS max, which creates a dilema.

As far as I'm aware, there is a blender plugin that exports to the Unreal Editor (the Unreal Engines ediitng interface) but I haven't researched it much. Anything is possible I guess.

It all comes down to resources and how much funding is assigned to the course.