FOSS in Courses 1 (Instructors)

Revision as of 16:58, 16 September 2016

Background:

When many people think about including FOSS in a class, they are typically thinking of one of two things:

1. Finding an artifact from the FOSS project such as a code segment that provides the base for study within the classroom (e.g., code review), or
2. Making a code contribution to the project by fixing a bug or making an enhancement.

However, there are myriad different activities based on FOSS as well as ways of contributing to FOSS projects that go beyond coding. The purpose of this activity is to explore some of the other ways to introduce students to and/or involve students in FOSS projects.

Note that the goal of this activity is to get a general idea of appropriate activities and things that you could do in class. It is not expected that you have a complete set of assignments or possibly even one complete assignment by the end of this activity. But by the end you should have an idea of some possibilities of where you could use activities with your course(s).

Directions

1. Let's start by observing some of the different activities and ways to contribute.
   1. Read Andy Lester's 14 Ways to Contribute to Open Source without Being a Programming Genius or a Rock Star. Andy does a great job of identifying and ameliorating roadblocks for newbies.
   2. Read Craig Buchek's great list of ways to contribute other than code.
   3. Read through the list of activities on the 50 Ways to be a FOSSer page.
2. Rather than reinvent the wheel, lets explore some of the existing materials based on student involvement in FOSS.Read through the following collection of resources.
   1. There is a set of learning activities, most of which are introductory assignments, on this wiki. This learning activity itself is part of that set of learning activities. You'll find it under the "education" sub-category.
   2. TeachingOpenSource has a Teaching Materials Catalog that contains examples of courses and a few individual assignments.
   3. Steve Jacobs at RIT has a Open Source Course.
   4. Seneca College has a Center for Open Source Technology that has links to courses that utilize FOSS.
   5. Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute also has a Center for Open Source Software.
3. Lets turn our attention to your HFOSS project of interest:
   1. Identify activities or topics that you are interested in within your HFOSS project of interest. This can be a rough list and can serve as the basis for identifying possible class activities/topics.
4. Let's turn our attention to your own course.
   1. Now that you have an idea of the possible types of activities or topics, identify one or two that you think would fit in your class. These do not need to be polished. This can be a rough list of ideas.
   2. In your reading, did you find existing materials? If so, describe how would you modify them to fit your class?
   3. If you did not find existing materials, summarize the activity in a sentence or two.
   4. Post the activity to your wiki page. Note that you may end up identifying more activities than you can use in a single class. Think big!

Deliverables:

Wiki posting describing the course and identifying one or two possible activities that students can complete as part of the course.

Assessment:

How will the activity be graded?

How will learning will be measured?

Include sample assessment questions/rubrics.

Comments:

What should the instructor know before using this activity?

What are some likely difficulties that an instructor may encounter using this activity?

Additional Information:

Suggestions for Open Source Community:

Suggestions for an open source community member who is working in conjunction with the instructor.

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