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Lessons learned from NCSU FOSS class

Linux.com
6.19.08

Lessons learned from NCSU FOSS class
By Bruce Byfield

Free and open source software (FOSS) is only beginning to find a
foothold in computer science departments in North America. FOSS tools
may be used in teaching or be the subject of research or special
committees, but few departments include courses that introduce students
to the FOSS community. As a result, when North Carolina State University
created a FOSS graduate course in the 2008 spring semester, it turned to
Red Hat to find an instructor with a suitable background of FOSS
involvement and university teaching experience. Community manager Greg
DeKoenigsberg recommended performance tools engineer Will Cohen, who now
looks back at the experience with an eye to how what he and his students
learned might help other instructors.

Cohen says he taught Open Source Software Communication (CSC 591W) as a
graduate course to nine students. Eventually, the course may be offered
to undergraduates, but Cohen says that this spring's format was "more a
case of making sure we get the mechanics down, and the course material."

Teaching about FOSS at the graduate level simplified Cohen's role as
instructor in the first offering of the course. He says, "If you teach
an undergraduate course, you have to be more concerned with
accreditation requirements in terms of the design and test
requirements." Moreover, because of the emphasis on direct experience,
the course had an open-ended structure that would be more comfortable
for graduate rather than undergraduate students, to say nothing of being
easier for Cohen to grade because of the much smaller size of graduate
courses. Nor, on the graduate level, was there much need to worry about
prerequisites -- students either had the programming skills to
participate in the FOSS community, or else could be safely assumed to be
capable of quickly picking them up.

Just as importantly, a FOSS course could benefit graduate students most.
Not only could grad students "leverage existing software for their own
research purposes," rather than writing what they needed for themselves,
but their code could potentially find a larger audience.

"If you take a look at some software projects that students work on,"
Cohen says, "they may have something that's really great and
interesting, but it never gets very much exposure because it's built in
their own little lab and only really gets used in the lab." Instead, by
contributing to a FOSS project, students could both get more peer review
and have a portfolio sample when they start to look for employment after
graduation.

Full article:
http://www.linux.com/feature/138338