[TOS] TOS learning activities that you have or wish you had

Tue Sep 18 00:07:44 UTC 2018

Great summary Clif! A few comments below.

Heidi

On 09/17/2018 08:56 AM, Clif Kussmaul wrote:
I agree that this is a key challenge. ☺ I’m not sure how to make a general, scalable structure where students can easily contribute to FOSS. It’s hard to define rules or steps when FOSS projects & courses vary so much. It’s certainly much easier when the faculty have direct experience in the FOSS project, or when they work with a small group of students.

I think some FOSS projects try to identify tasks suitable for students or other new contributors, although it takes time to curate such lists, and one large class could clean out the list quickly, creating problems if several classes try to use the project at the same time.

Could we have students identify such tasks instead? (This would be more scalable.) For example, assign each student or team to read through a set of items (docs, tickets, code), find as many errors as possible (including spelling, grammar, & formatting), and add them to a list (maybe the project tracker, maybe a class-specific tracker).
This would make an awesome assignment or in-class activity!

Many students (& faculty) have little or no experience with these tasks, so we’d like to help them practice. I’ve thought about case studies / scenarios / simulations to help students learn about specific aspects of FOSS. We have some short examples in POSSE, but could expand them for classroom use. For example, they might prompt students to:
- read a page of documentation or code, identify potential problems, and decide how it could be improved
- read a task tracker ticket (or set of related tickets) and decide how they could be improved, or combined
- read a transcript from IRC, a mailing list, or email, and identify inappropriate behavior, or decide how each person could have improved the exchange
- read a set of related items (ticket, discussion, docs, code) and decide what to do next
Could also do this in conjunction with a FOSS community member.

I’ve also thought about a reusable “sandbox” project, which faculty could install, configure, and reset each term for new groups of students. The project would come with many simple tasks, such as: edit a tracker ticket; edit a doc in a wiki or CMS; edit a file under version control, etc. It could also include tasks of varying difficulty, tools to (randomly) inject small errors and generate tasks, or reports to help faculty monitor student progress.
This could be a snapshot of a real FOSS project, or a fake project designed for the requirements of TOS. So in some ways it would be more like a case study or simulation than a real project.

Clif
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Clif Kussmaul  clif at kussmaul.org<mailto:clif at kussmaul.org>  http://kussmaul.org<http://kussmaul.org/>  +1-484-893-0255  EDT=GMT-5

From: Shobha Tyagi [mailto:tyagishobha at gmail.com]
Sent: Sunday, September 16, 2018 1:38 AM
To: Clif Kussmaul <clifkussmaul at gmail.com><mailto:clifkussmaul at gmail.com>
Cc: Discussions about Teaching Open Source <tos at teachingopensource.org><mailto:tos at teachingopensource.org>
Subject: Re: [TOS] TOS learning activities that you have or wish you had

Hi! Clif,

 I keep teaching the students about the benefits of using and contributing to open source. But I exactly don't know
how to make them real contributors and see them enjoying contributing.
If we have set of rules or steps that our students can follow.
which I can give them as an assignment and award them marks if successfully achieved their goals.
It would greatly benefit our students who really wish to contribute.

Thanks&Regards,
Shobha

On Fri, Sep 14, 2018 at 7:40 PM Clif Kussmaul <clifkussmaul at gmail.com<mailto:clifkussmaul at gmail.com>> wrote:
Hello TOS community,
TL;DR:
Please reply to me (not the whole list) with details on:
- TOS learning activities that you created, that other faculty would find useful, but that you haven’t posted.
- TOS learning activities that you would like to use, but that you looked for and didn’t find.
Details:
The OpenPath team plans to map each learning activity to the relevant ACM Body of Knowledge areas & subareas.
This should help faculty find relevant activities, and identify gaps where we need new activities.
If you have activities, we’d like to help you add them to teachingopensource.org<http://teachingopensource.org> and/or foss2serve.org<http://foss2serve.org> so others can find them.
If you want activities, we’d like to help find ways to create and pilot them.
I will share a summary, depending in part on the volume and variety of responses.
Thank you,
Clif
---
Clif Kussmaul  clif at kussmaul.org<mailto:clif at kussmaul.org>  http://kussmaul.org<http://kussmaul.org/>  +1-484-893-0255  EDT=GMT-5
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