Session F2B 978-1-4244-6262-9/10/$26.00 ©2010 IEEE October 27 - 30, 2010, Washington, DC 40 th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference F2B-1 Panel - Teaching Students to Participate in Open Source Software Projects Heidi J. C. Ellis, Gregory W. Hislop, Mel Chua, Clif Kussmaul, Matthew M. Burke hellis@wnec.edu, hislop@drexel.edu, mel@redhat.com, kussmaul@muhlenberg.edu, mmburke@gwu.edu Abstract – This panel will present several experiences in involving students in Open Source Software (OSS) projects from the perspectives of both the instructor and a member of the OSS community. OSS is growing rapidly and gaining market share in both industry (e.g., Linux and Mozilla) as well as academia (e.g, Moodle, Greenfoot, and Drupal). OSS projects have a culture built on volunteer participation to support software development. Computing degree programs desire to involve students in large-scale software projects to provide students with real-world experience and an understanding of the issues found in large, complex software projects. Involving computing students in OSS projects serves both the OSS community by providing development resources for the project while also serving the academic community by providing access to large software projects in which students can gain experience. However, the marriage of student and OSS project presents some challenges including identification of approachable OSS projects, creation of appropriate educational infrastructure, evaluation and grading, and more. Panelists will address the factors that contribute to student success in an OSS project. Index Terms – Open source software, real-world education, student software project. GOAL Open Source Software (OSS) has become mainstream and the number of OSS projects is growing rapidly. For example, sourceforge.net has 230,000 registered OSS projects and over 2,000,000 registered users. Since software engineering artifacts are frequently accessible online and collaborators and contributors to the project are easily identifiable, OSS provides a practical and useful way to supply students with experience in many aspects of software development. Quite simply, the range and volume of software projects accessible to students via OSS is unmatched by anything publicly available prior to the emergence of open source. Students can view and learn from existing artifacts and can join an ongoing project. Students can interact with experienced developers, experience a variety of development environments, and participate in professional communications. Many members of both the open source community and academia have realized the benefits of student involvement in OSS and have formed the Teaching Open Source community [1]. However, from an instructional standpoint, involving students in OSS projects presents some challenges: • How do instructors identify suitable OSS projects? • What are ways that students can participate in and contribute to OSS projects? • How do instructors involve students in OSS projects? • How do instructors evaluate student contributions to OSS projects? • What resources are available for instructors looking to involve students in OSS projects? This panel will report on several diverse experiences involving students and instructors in OSS projects. The panel includes educators and members of OSS projects in order to provide perspectives from both academia and OSS environments. PARTICIPANTS AND TOPICS The panel participants will each discuss their experiences, focusing on the challenges encountered and how such challenges were met. Heidi Ellis is one of the founding members of the HFOSS (Humanitarian FOSS) project [2,3,4] which focuses on involving students in OSS projects that improve the human condition. Heidi is also PI on the SoftHum project [5] which develops course materials that support student involvement in HFOSS projects. Heidi will moderate the discussion as well as share her experiences on how she started engaging students in Sahana, a disaster relief application. Heidi will explain how the HFOSS effort got started and the steps taken during the startup of the HFOSS effort to introduce students into HFOSS projects. Greg Hislop is principal investigator or Co-PI on several projects that focus on developing ways to involve students in OSS as project contributors [4,5,6]. He is also working on ways to have students participate as providers of IT support services for users of open source products. Greg will discuss the various ways that OSS has been introduced into the Drexel curriculum for the computing degrees in computer science, software engineering, information systems, and information technology. Greg will include ideas for taking initial steps to add OSS activities to a computing curriculum. He will also address learning curve issues for instructors including sources of assignments and other instructional materials. Finally, he will discuss the range of assignments and contributions that students can make beyond contributions of source code.