Courware Guidlines

Courseware Motivation

The concept of open source technology based courseware starts with the fundamental assumption that while information is freely available over the internet, the lack of a structured approach often makes it hard for a student developer to locate the right information or figure out where to start etc. The reasons are very similar to what was recognized for computer science education/curriculum earlier this decade in this report from ACM

While open source technologies come in all shapes and sizes and difficult to structure with a single set pattern, we will attempt to provide a simple guideline for courseware content contributors here, such that institutions can offer them as electives to undergraduate students. Overall motivations are

1. Each courseware should be able to cover a full term when offered as elective.
2. Target student segment would be undergraduate students in their final or pre-final year in 3 to 4 year degree course unless otherwise mentioned. This is based on the assumption that at the time of taking up the course, students would have already finished topics on fundamentals of computer science and basic programming concepts.
3. Students taking up the elective would be evaluated at the end of the term.

Goals

Help students gain hands-on experience with a set of technologies. The idea is to inculcate problem solving skills in them for which open source provides an easy medium without the restrictions of geography providing free access to source code.

Prerequisites

Common concepts and skills that can be considered must know or good to know at the time students sign up for the course. If it helps, include links and resources to help students brush up concepts.

Complexity or Level

While it is difficult to come up with a generic scale on complexity level for the courses, a broad classification would be useful to help students pick the right one based on their comfort level. For now we can take to the generic community driven classification of ‘Beginners’, ‘Intermediate’, ‘Advanced’.

Structure

Given the courses are targeted towards helping students develop hands-on skills, the courseware are expected to include classroom teaching content that would help develop the required technology base followed by hands-on assignments which would serve as deliverables for evaluation. For Intermediate and Advanced courses, it is recommended to also have projects in addition to classroom instructions and assignments. Project deliverables would be part of the evaluation as well. For example, a project can be developing a sub-system of an existing open source project or additional modules, extensions. It is also recommended to have these project identified with the help of related open source project developers who can also provide the required guidance as mentors. While the break up is going to be dependent on the course a sort of guideline can be 40% classroom and 60% assignment for Beginner level courses. For Intermediate and advanced level the share can be 30% classroom, 30% assignment and 40% projects. Note that these are suggested break up only.

Evaluation

As mentioned above evaluation is a required part for the courseware to be offered as electives in most cases. Therefore it would be helpful to include recommendation by courseware content contributors on evaluation process for instructors to drive consistency. These can be in the form of suggested assignments, sample questions etc. As for projects targeted towards intermediate and advanced levels, the best way to evaluate is by the mentors who provide the guidance. Kenfuse can be the platform through which mentors and instructors can collaborate to come up with suitable evaluation approach and work the operation details. Projects are expected to be individual in most cases and the evaluation/feedback by mentors can be included (optional) into the students user profile

Duration

The number of classroom sessions tends to vary a lot across institutions and pedagogy styles. However for simplicity sake we propose to target about 40 hours of ‘in class’ session per term. The hours indicate time spent in class only and not outside of class. As a general guideline amount of out of class work is expected to be about 3 times that of in class sessions i.e if 3 hours are spent per week in class then the students are expected to put in about 9 hours outside class per week. Also note that the recommended 40 hours is for the entire term which would mean about 16 hours (40% of 40 hours) of actual teaching by the instructor in a Beginner course. Rest of the in class session can be utilized to go over the progress of assignments and projects. Instructors can encourage students to make presentation on status and challenges faced if any to keep up the momentum and track towards successful completion.

Delivery

The entire courseware content is suggested to be a combination of html pages (Documents within Kenfuse) and presentation slides. See example courseware here. Besides, it may be useful for content contributors to include links and references for further study including recommendation of books or online content etc. Instructors are expected to review the courseware content and adapt it to their need or pedagogy style. Students are expected to upload their assignments along with a submission report for evaluation. Submission report to include

• Description of the assignment
• Brief discussion on the assignment implementation
• Challenges faced and how they were overcome
• Tools and utilities used
• References to information that were considered useful.
• Any other relevant remarks

For projects see project delivery life cycle

Students picking up a particular courseware are expected to sign up at Kenfuse so that they can upload their assignment and project submissions.

FAQ

TBD

Presentation Templates

Pick Microsoft Power Point (.ppt) or Open office Impress template (.odp).