User talk:Sksowe
Curricular often emphasize that software engineering courses should have a significant 'real-world' experience necessary to enable effective learning of software engineering skills, processes, techniques, and concepts. If all goes well is educators may wish, didactics should challenge, motivate and engage students in meaningful and realistic activities so that they go out to become useful members of society. Teaching and learning should be Reflective, Interactive, Proactive (RIP-the benefits) and inviting experience. Guidelines such as the Software Engineering Body of Knowledge (SWEBOK) and the IEEE/ACM Joint Task Force on Computing shows, among other things, what to teach, how to teach, what the expected outcomes of a course are. And many efforts are being made to give students practical hands-on experience by involving them in software projects in local companies and by exposing them to SE practice and tools through capstone projects. BUT
1) Will local software companies entrust the core or source code to students?
2) Well capstone or semester based projects give students sufficient experience in working in realistic software development environments when they graduate?
Yet, many students graduate from universities and colleges ill-prepared to face and work in realistic software engineering environments. One explanation for this might be due to the fact that, software projects in real as well as virtual (F/OSS projects, for example) world involves participants with different skills and experiences and is full of inconsistencies, complex, takes time to develop, and changing all the time.
These characteristics are not only challenging but difficult to replicate in many classrooms with fixed time-tables and short semesters.
Are there practices to be adopted or lessons to be learnt from open source software projects?
What open source teaching and learning models are out there to act as guidelines for computer science teachers to follow?
Who is experimenting with open source methods, trying-out what works and what does not work, developing open source course materials? How can exposing your students to open source software development make the teacher in you happy?
Share your ideas and comments