Presenter Name Event Name

Open Software Engineering

Education

Ioannis Stamelos VISIR Seminar 25-26 March 2014

www.visir-network.eu

Paste here the logo or an image or a small picture which

represents your practice and makes it immediately

identifiable.

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My practice in 1 slide

• Objective: Engage Aristotle University undergraduate students in real life - open source software projects, as part of

their practical assignment (term project for software engineering related academic courses)

• Sector: Academy / Computer Science / Software Engineering

• Impact: Students learn how to apply formal education concepts by taking part in real world action. They obtain both

technical knowledge and non-technical skills that are hard to acquire in a traditional lab environment.

• Why is it innovative? (a) It allows blending of formal education and informal, community based, first-hand

experiences, (b) it transfers part of the education burden to communities of practice, (c) it saves resources (e.g.

teaching assistants) while it allows personalized student projects, (d) it supports accumulation and management of

past knowledge and experience in terms of 'learning projects' and (e) it supports open source.

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The history of my practice• It started in 2005 with 13 volunteer students. Now approx. 150 students yearly.

• Funded twice by EU (FLOSSCOM, OPENSE projects)

• Several problems/barriers have been encountered: (a) often students choose inappropriate OSS projects,

(b) some students find this kind of project too demanding or (c) are too timid to achieve an effective

relationship with OSS communities. No barriers from home institution though!

• Students are free to choose their OSS project and have a flexible time plan to finish and deliver their work.

Students receive constant support by academic staff to overcome potential problems and make correct

decisions.

• Would change: Students are supported by an educational system (www.opense.net), that needs to be

redesigned to be more flexible, user-friendly and enhanced with knowledge management tools. Only three

software engineering tasks are currently allowed (requirements engineer, tester, coder), more roles should

be offered (e.g. related to OSS project qualification, refactoring, documentation)

• Should not change: Freedom and flexibility for students, their term project must be open source alike

itself!

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The future of my practice

• In 3 years from now: (a) same or similar student project structure (b) choice of more tasks (c) more

integration with specific OSS projects (d) fully redesigned educational system, with advanced

knowledge management tools

• In 10 years from now: (a) application on more computer science courses (b) extension to non CS

courses

• What would we need to make it scalable? Dissemination of the overall idea, experimentation on

non CS disciplines, funding of educational system development