Experiences of Teaching and Learning Software Development with Open Source Approach

1
Experiences of Teaching and Learning Software
Developmentwith Open Source Approach

• T-76.651 Seminar on Distributed Product
  Development Open source Software Development
• Presentation 7.12.2004
• Janne Kankaanpää, jjkankaa_at_cc.hut.fi

2
Research questions

• How open source approach or tools have been used
  in teaching software development?
• What are the learning experiences from using open
  source approach in software development?

3
Motivation

• Software development education still follows
  tradiotional paths
• Open source movement offers some new methods for
  teaching and learning software development
• Relationship between education and open source
  has not been researched much

4
Material

• Software maintenance course
• (Andrews Lutfiyya, 2000)
• Software design and testing course
• (Carrington Kim, 2003)
• Client-server application development course
  (Shira-an et al., 2000)
• Organizational learning in OS project
• (Huntley, 2003)
• Learning as one of the motives
• (Ye Kishida, 2003)

5
Results

• Open source approach was used quite similarly in
  two software engineering courses
• Open source tools were used in many courses to
  support teaching and to bring more possibilities
  to teaching
• The teachers of the courses reported positive
  overall teaching experiences, and recommended
  open source approach and tools to wider use
• Open source and commercial-client projects were
  compared with each other as students were made to
  participate in them

6
... results

• There were very little learning experiences of
  open source reported, only a study related to
  organizational learning was found
• There was also discussion about learning as one
  of the main motivators of open source software
  developer. This is an aspect that could be used
  by software development educators, and even
  software companies that are training new employees