Service Learning Project - OSS in Education

Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) has become a major movement in the modern software industry. In the education area, there are numerous endeavors to study how to teach the students the concept of FOSS, and how to guide students in Open Source project, because the Open Source projects can be a great tool to teach students programing and experiencing kind of team work around the whole world. However, the endeavor is still very limited, probably because it is very hard to formalize a standard teaching strategy / method.

This project stands from a different perspective: We focus on teaching student the concept of FOSS through a service-learning approach, instead of teaching the students in the computer science related majors to experience the programing in a specific Open Source project. Our focus is general college students disregarding the majors. More specifically, students will look for a FOSS solution in the education area and our daily life to meet specific needs, and then provide online tutorials to introduce their results to others. 

Instruction:

• Address the issue that you want to solve. Below are some sample topics:

  • Design free online survey form with Google Docs

  • Free Web Hosting Services for Personal Usage

  • Portable Solution for Using Specific Software in Public Computer Lab

  • etc.

• Search online for possible solutions, read review about them and choose one or two solutions.

• Try the selected solution(s) by following the provided guideline or help info. online.

• Record your experience: 

  • Date; 

  • What did you do? 

  • What happened? 

  • Is it right or wrong? 

  • What's the reason?

  • etc.

• Draft your tutorial document by reorganizing your experience note. The tutorial document should include:

  • Topic

  • Abstract: a brief summary about the introduced software / service and what you provide in this tutorial document.

  • Content: should be formatted as: Step 1: ......; Step 2: ......; etc. And the steps should be able to be repeated by others. (Suggestion: you can find some other student to repeat your described steps and see if it works.)

  • Related references and links

• Submit your tutorial document to Dr. Jiang () for evaluation and earning Service-Learning Credits.