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[edit] Open Source Curriculum in Higher Education.
[edit] Motivations and Goals
FLOSS (free, libre, open source software) is going mainstream. Software has evolved tremendously over the last two decades, and the industry is asking for an increasing number of well trained professionals that are able to install, exploit, maintain, develop and create sophisticated software artifacts, in particular coming from the FLOSS world.
In addition, complex decisions have to be taken in the area of FLOSS usage, development and business. Therefore, a holistic education is needed, including not only technical, but also legal, economic, and other disciplines.
Academia may contribute to answer this demand by developing a curriculum specifically taking into account the changes that FLOSS has brought to the software ecosystem, and incorporating FLOSS into the early stages of traditional IT curricula.
We want to federate as largely as possible the academics having made experiences in this area over the past years, to deliver a road map for higher education at the OWF/FML conference on December 1st.
We believe that the knowledge corpus in this area is already mature enough to let students acquire proven and solid capabilities and knowledge.
When considering issues related to libre software education, there are two separate lines that can be addressed:
- A curricular approach, defining contents that should be introduced in any kind of studies to ensure that the resulting professional has capabilities and knowledge in the area of libre software.
- An implementation approach, defining properties that some specific studies, as implemented by a certain institution, has to fulfil to be "compliant with the principles of libre software", or "friendly to libre software". That could include, for instance, using only libre software in practises, using open standards implemented with at least one libre software program for any electronic documentation, etc. Please note that those criteria could of course be applied to IT studies, but also to, eg. law or medicine.
The first approach is focused on providing professionals capable in the libre software field. The second is working on Universities more friendly to libre software. Both things are of interest to Universities, students (and professionals, when they become that) and the society.
[edit] FLOSS curriculum
In the FLOSS curriculum area, a list of contents (a-la ACM curriculum) is defined for certain kinds of capacities related to FLOSS (general FLOSS knowledge, administrator of FLOSS systems, FLOSS developer, FLOSS project manager, FLOSS strategist, etc.). Some of them could be implemented in undergraduate studies, some others in masters, depending on Universities and on the different implementations of Bologna.
A specific page has been open for linking to relevant resources for the curriculum design.
[edit] FLOSS friendly implementation
The conditions for a FLOSS friendly implementation of some studies is a list of properties that a given implementation of a curriculum (be it undergraduate, postgraduate or even doctor) should satisfy to consider it "libre software friendly".
[edit] Events
[edit] Open World Forum, Paris, December 1st 2008
We had a first event in the Open World Forum Open World Forum, that was actually composed of *two* parts:
- one full slot of 1h in the plenary conference on Education, Careers, Trainign and Jobs track (morning of December 1st)
- a 2 to 4 hours slot for a meeting of all actors interested in the FLOSS curriculum (afternoon of December 1st)
- the slides are available online
- an interesting discussion touched various aspects of the curriculum design, a summary is on this page
[edit] Designing for participatory learning, June 6, 2009, Skövde, Sweden
1st International Workshop on "D4PL - Designing for participatory learning". Co-located with OSS 2009, 5th International Conference on Open Source Systems
Building from open source success to develop free ways to share and learn
[edit] ITiCSE 2009, Paris, July 3-8, 2009
14th Annual Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education
- Working group to be submitted before January 23.
[edit] How to participate
Please register to the FOSS Curriculum Mailing list, and feel free to edit this wiki after registering (please use the discussion page to raise issues that need discussion before changing the wiki).
Those interested in participating in the curriculm design should also check out the information about how to participate in the process.
[edit] How to use this wiki
Consult the User's Guide for information on using the wiki software.
