Heid Ellis

Meeting the strong demand for computing professionals will require attracting and retaining more students in computing degree programs. Women and people of color are significantly underrepresented among computing students, and these groups provide an opportunity to both create a more equitable discipline and meet the need for more computing graduates. In order to attract more of these students, computing educators must improve the quality, appeal and student success rate in computing degree programs. This presentation discusses an education effort that helps to address this challenge by expanding the community of faculty incorporating Humanitarian Free and Open Source Software (HFOSS) into computing education. HFOSS education provides a collaborative environment that supports active learning with real-world tasks. Students gain both technical and professional skills while also acquiring a first-hand understanding of the potential for computing to have both social relevance and positive societal impact. The ability of computing to “do good” has been shown to attract women and other underrepresented groups into computing disciplines. The project is intended to have broader impact in the following areas: a) improving student retention and expanding appeal to women and underrepresented groups; b) providing real-world learning of professional and technical skills in a complex, authentic environment that prepares students for professional practice; c) extending understanding of the impact of HFOSS pedagogy and approaches on student and instructor role and identities; and d) increasing student understanding of the potential of computing to improve the human condition and in student awareness of professional responsibility. Initial work has included several surveys of undergraduate students (209 and 360 participants) that indicate women and underrepresented groups are more strongly motivated by the humanitarian nature of HFOSS projects. The presentation will include results of these surveys and discussion of HFOSS education as an approach to making computing more diverse while also advancing student knowledge of open source.

Other people: Grant Braught

In an ideal world, students would graduate from college with a comprehensive understanding of open source and an ability to contribute to an open source community in some significant way. In reality, while all students know about open source and most students use open source products, very few students have much understanding of open source. Students do not know how large open source is, they have no idea that open source can be a career, and little awareness of the tools and processes that make open source communities successful. This presentation will present results of surveys that exemplify the very shallow student understanding of open source. Improving open source education would benefit both students and open source communities. Student benefits from open source participation include exposure to an evolving, complex software system, development of professional skills, improved technical skills, better understanding of team-based development in a distributed environment and more. Open source communities can also benefit from student participation. Students can relieve more experienced developers from routine tasks such as bug verification and documentation, and they have added incentive to participate due to class requirements. In addition, students can be supported by academic infrastructure so that they are not relying solely on the OSS community for learning. Finally, open source education will help ensure a continuing flow of professional developers into open source projects. In order to prepare students for open source, students must learn about open source culture, tools, and processes.. Unfortunately, many schools are not teaching even basic open source tools such as version control, issue trackers, and CI/CD pipelines, and only a small number of schools are covering open source processes or culture. How can educators better prepare students for open source by incorporating these necessary skills and information into an undergraduate program? This talk will discuss the gap between undergraduate computing education and open source community expectations, the reasons for this gap, and approaches for bridging the gap.

Other people: Gregory W. Hislop