[TOS] Partners for a Software Eng/FOSS Course?

[Allen Tucker]

Hi Matt,

First, to your PS, which is really related to your main questions.  I taught a FOSS development class at Bowdoin with 16 students and 4 projects in 2013 and it was crazy.  As you already suspected, there was too much management overhead and too little time — in the end, only 2 of the 4 FOSS artifacts were actually deployed.

In spring 2015 I taught the same class at Whitman College with 9 students and 2 different projects.  Still a lot of work, but more successful — both teams delivered FOSS artifacts that are in productive use today.

One Whitman project is called BMAC-Warehouse, a food bank inventory system, and the other is called RMHP-Homebase, a volunteer scheduling system.  Detailed descriptions, along with all the teaching materials, the code base, and a “sandbox” database for these two projects are freely available for download and reuse at http://npfi.org/content/projects.

So this approach is different from plugging students into an ongoing FOSS project like OpenMRS — instead, the students complete a software project that is scaled to fit within a semester.  They work as an agile team with the non-profit client at the table throughout the semester.  The goal is to deliver a custom FOSS product at the end of the semester that the non-profit will deploy and use thereafter.  The requirements document and a modest initial code base are provided at the beginning of the course.  Some of the coding involves refactoring/reusing code that had been developed by other students for a similar application with a different client.

Long story short, I think that having 20+ students in your class rules out the (ambitious) goal of my approach — your goal would need to be different in order to enable every student to succeed with FOSS development.  Here are two slightly different examples of larger 1-semester classes that you might want to follow up on:

1.  Bonnie MacKellar taught a FOSS course with about 25 students and a single FOSS application for room scheduling the Ronald McDonald House in Manhattan, NYC.

2.  Mihaela Sabin taught a FOSS course with 20+ students at UNH with a single FOSS fund-raising application called “Donate” for the local YWCA in Manchester, NH.

There’s a publication available which describes these additional experiences in detail at http://npfi.org/sites/default/files/MacKellarSabinTuckerBookchapterFinal.pdf.  Bonnie or Mihaela may want to provide you with additional insights into teaching FOSS with larger classes.

Hope this helps,

Allen

cc Bonnie, Mihaela

On Nov 10, 2015, at 11:33 AM, Matt Jadud <matt at jadud.com<mailto:matt at jadud.com>> wrote:

Hi all,

Of course, I should have asked this question sooner... but, it's not
TOO late yet...

It is official: I'll be teaching an upper-division software
engineering course next term. Naturally, I'll model it on OSD600 @
Seneca / CS490 SE @ WNE / whatever Greg and others call it at their
institutions. Specifically, a course in the spirit of the work the
POSSE/HFOSS groups have been doing. (It only took since 2009 for me to
teach such a course...)

I'd welcome a brief phone call with any faculty who have taught such a
course recently (so I can make sure I've got the big pieces and some
of the gotcha-details right in my mine), and also would welcome some
recommendations regarding projects to reach out to as possible targets
for the students. OpenMRS looks like an obvious community (as they're
incredibly well organized w.r.t. onboarding and early-stage
participants/contributors), but I haven't done a lot of research yet
as to other places I might go. (I haven't even dug through
openhatch.org<http://openhatch.org> yet, even though I know I should.)

Many thanks,
Matt

PS. Unrelated, I have to decide if I should hold the cap at 20
students, or let it grow... I have... at least six more who want in.
Where does the management of the course/number of students/teams
overrun a faculty's ability to keep things on the rails? "Productively
lost" aside, there's a real management issue with too many teams doing
too many things in too short a time-frame...
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