[TOS] Statistics/Papers about Open Source at Universities?

[Mel Chua]

>> to any papers or research about the percent of universities that are
>> teaching open source software as part of the computer science education
>> and/or those which are using open source in general in their university.
>> I've found lots of resources that indicate that it's important to use open
>> source, but I have yet to find any specific papers with percentages of those
>> teaching/using it.

Measuring "teaching open source" activity has many of the same problems 
as measuring "using open source" activity -- since it's an open process 
with no registration, training, etc. requirements, there's no central 
authority or definitive number. Which makes our lives as researchers a 
little harder. ;)

That having been said, there might be some things we can point you to 
that could help paint a better picture (like the paper Gregorio linked 
to -- thanks, Gregorio, I hadn't seen that one before!) Carol, are you 
looking for...

* universities/colleges using open source in their IT infrastructure 
(I'm guessing no, but this would be one of the easier ones to chase 
down; iirc there are Red Hat sales folks dedicated to education accounts 
and they might be able to give numbers of some sort)

* universities/colleges using open source as part of classroom 
infrastructure, at the individual professor level -- a faculty member 
setting up a Linux lab, or a Mediawiki instance for his/her department, 
or having students blog on a common class Planet -- where students may 
use FLOSS software, but it's incidental to the primary learning goals 
(somewhat impossible to measure, except anecdotally or from stats from 
edu-focused projects like Moodle)

* universities/colleges with classes that focus specifically on teaching 
the *use* of open source tools (graphic design through Inkscape instead 
of Photoshop, etc -- and do classes focused on open source programming 
languages like Python count? Again, pretty impossible to measure)

* universities/colleges with classes that focus on having students 
*contribute* to FLOSS projects (patching Firefox, doing requirements 
analysis for RTEMS, testing GNOME betas, hosting Ubuntu installfests, 
etc?) I think most people here focus on this last category. In terms of 
frequency of that in North America, this is a *very* partial count, but 
there are...

* 10 HFOSS institutions, according to 
http://www.hfoss.org/index.php/chapters_list
* 71 POSSE alumni (some from the HFOSS institutions, some from others) 
before the summer of 2012; the number is closer to 100 now
* multiple academic centers/institutes/etc focused on FLOSS -- I can 
think of OSU, RPI, and RIT right now but am probably missing some. 
Again, some overlap. And also note that all those faculty/institutions 
may not have active classes/programs at this very moment.

But as a rough order of magnitude, let's grossly underestimate 100 
faculty, anywhere in the world, actively teaching FLOSS contribution in 
their classes right now. Let's say each of them does this for at least 
one class, that the average class size is 25 students, and that students 
spend an average of 9 hours a week on that professor's class. Then we're 
looking at 100*25*9*2 = 45,000 student-hours, or the equivalent of 
23,4375 full-time jobs (40 hours per week, 48 weeks per year). And 
that's very, very, *very* much an underestimate (and only looks at 
student-hours, not professor-hours -- and only looks at classes, not 
clubs or capstones or co-ops or research), but probably falls within the 
order-of-magnitude ballpark.

Maybe a better question is what you're trying to use this sort of data 
for. :)

--Mel