Thank you for taking the time to share this! It's very interesting to hear of the activities in France, especially for those of us who would not understand the original material due to the language barriers.
Greg Hislop -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Ivaylo Ganchev Sent: Monday, February 06, 2012 1:06 PM To: [email protected] Subject: [TOS] Feedback of the "Teaching Free software in French universities" day (February 2nd) Hello, as I told you earlier this month, we had a meeting at IRILL on the 2nd of February in order to share experiences in teaching open source technologies in French universities. The complete program is available here (in french) http://www.irill.org/events/lsoc-logiciels-libres-et-enseignement-superieur. I would like to make you a not-so-brief resume of what was said that day. Please excuse my french. My presentation was the first one, because very general and introductory. I tried to list a fair amount of experiences that are common to both worlds : FLOSS and university. I divided these experiences in 3 categories : a complete diplomas (4 in France for now : 1 master degree and 3 "licences" -- a grade that one obtains after 3 year in university), a single classes, a miscellaneous project -- could be an event, a website that is dedicated on that subject, a work group or mailing list on the subject, articles etc... We will soon publish all the presentations and you could see the links. The goal of my presentation was not to be exhaustive, but to try to designate some common characteristics : the importance of personal motivation, the difficulties to discover these projects and to have a feed-back, the difficulties to generalize such an experience, because very often it was made available by the teacher and involves his personal capacities, contacts etc... In the same time we are feeling the need of more organized FLOSS classes, the industries are meeting higher demands, the existing experiences are very promising and let us think that teaching FLOSS technologies his very positive (pedagogically speaking) for students. The next presentation was done by Roland Levillain of EPITA. He discussed a project called Tiger. The goal is to create a compiler for the Tiger language. Doing this they submerge the students in the usage of all kind free software technologies (editors, compilers, debuggers, code repositories etc), and thus they hope to implicitly create habits for the students in using and developing free software. The next presentation was by Didier Courteaud of Université d'Evry. They are leading for some years now the CoMETE program in a Business Management Master degree. The CoMETE initiative is a collaboration of their university and the Mozilla Foundation. Mozilla engaged in providing tutors for the classes (payed by the university) and the goal of the class is to learn some of the Mozilla technologies. Students realize a plugin of a feature of some of Mozilla's products (Firefox, Thunderbird, Composer). Some of the projects are in collaboration with local businesses. Didier finished by drawing a very positive feed-back of this experience : students were very glad, teachers were satisfied also, because of the pedagogical values of the projects. They are doing it for some years and are now trying to spread the experience to other universities (a bit hard for now -- not too much people involved from Mozilla). Next was a presentation of Jean-Baptiste Kempf -- a leader of the Videolan (VLC) project. He described the functioning of the VLC project, its architecture, the coming improvements. He then talked of the ways students are working with him on different parts of the project. The project in itself was started by students at the Ecole Centrale of Paris around 1995-1998. It is now developed outside of this school, but a fair amount of code is done by ancient students of Ecole Centrale. Every year VLC is participating in GSoC and couple of students are taking part in the development of VLC. Jean-Baptiste said that even outside of GSoC students ask him to participate in the VLC. Because of the high rate of failures, JB is now asking before sending students on a complicated task, to first try to accomplish a simple task (bug correction or similar). The next presentation was done by Karine Mordal of university Paris 8. For her class of "Comprehension of programs" she asked students to work on open source projects. There were different stages in accomplishing this : first students had to find a project. Then to get in contact with the developers and try to integrate the community. The next step was to ask for a work for the semester, then to install the coding environment (for the project they choose) and finally to start working. Students had to report weekly the advancement of their work. Students and the teacher were meeting weekly in order to make an appointment. She insisted on the fact that students need to be supervised, because often, when they see a difficult part they abandon the project. Karine draw some very positive conclusions. We are waiting for her to release the results of the questionnaire that she asked her students to answer at the end of the class. The following presentation was done by Morgan Magnin and two of his ex-students Benjamin Vialle and Nelle Varoquaux at Ecole Centrale de Nantes. For some years now they try to propose students to work on a free software project -- OpenOffice or MarkUs. They opted for the FLOSS choice considering that it is a better choice in order for the students to get in touch with "real" code. The work on OpenOffice was done in collaboration with Eric Bachard -- OOo core developer. They also insisted on the fact that students get demotivated and need to be "put back on track". Morgan said that after students finishing the project on the next year they are coming back as tutors. He said that it is a very positive trend that brings some dynamism to his class. He is also trying to spread this "per project" "open source" pedagogy to other less technical classes (writing Wikipedia articles etc...). Kevin Ottens (core developper of KDE) described us his experience in teaching extreme programming course with the KDE technology. He tried to organize all the work for this class around the Scrum method. Students were choosing freely a project to work on. Thus they were in contact with Kevin and the project core developer. Eventually they could also get some help from another technically savvy person part of the project. Kevin was assuring this class for 5 years, but now the school (which is part of the university Paul Sabatier of Toulouse) closed doors and he is actually trying to organize this class in another university. One positive consequence of the class is that students started to like programming and free software and they started gathering outside of the official classes to work on projects. Eventually the gatherings got bigger and bigger and it became a FLOSS meeting with comings of developers from other countries specially for these meetings etc... In the words of Kevin for a not so big city as Toulouse, it was a really nice story that brought some dynamics to the FLOSS life of the city. Next was Eric Ramat who talked us about the Master degree called Engineering of Free Software that he put in place at the Université du Littoral. The master exists for 5 years now and is a very nice peace to see. It was created at the demand of local businesses. It is a partnership between different projects, the local administration of the region etc... The most part of the teachers are contractors. It is a bit difficult to assure the classes, because less and less money is available in hiring non-permanent teachers. However he said that the guys that are coming to teach are very motivated, and often they give the classes without being payed. During the master, students gain knowledge not only in technology topics, but also in FLOSS governance, business models, some legal aspects etc... During the second year, students can choose an option : system/networking/security, web development, marketing and management etc... They have roughly 20 students / year. A student from this master told me some years ago that, as this master gained some fame, students from around France are coming to Calais to get into this master, which is not very common trait. Finally Eric said that it is a bit hard on local level in his university -- their effort is not well understood by other teachers, it is very hard to manage a big amount of contractors etc... Finally we finished the day by an unconference panel where we discussed about the sequels of the day. We made also some conclusions -- traits that resorted in all the presentations : the personal motivations from the part of the teacher for the existence of these experiences, the need to have a three-way partnership (professor, tutor, student), almost all the students looked positively on that experience (participate in a real-world experience, need to get in hand existing code, rewarding if they manage to finish the project), these projects are often harder and need more work from students, but also teachers. We then discussed the idea proposed by Albert Cohen : libre semester of code. The goal is to put students to work on free software projects during their internship (in France internship is mandatory after each year of a 2 year master degree). We discussed some administrative difficulties, but also about the risks in such a project. How could we be sure whether a student is working on the project. We tried to imagine a schema where money that is coming from participating businesses, is distributed by an intermediary structure as IRILL in order to "protect" students from direct interventions on behalf of the businesses. We were thinking of the pros and cons of creating a "label" LSoC and try to promote this label in universities. Finally we will try to put in place a mailing list, a wiki or blog and a common resource pool (TOS is a good example to follow). Everyone was very motivated at the end of the day and we are heading to see what we can do about spreading our examples in other French universities. Sorry for this long mail, but I think this experience was to be shared. Will write back when videos and slides are online. Cheers, Ivaylo _______________________________________________ tos mailing list [email protected] http://lists.teachingopensource.org/mailman/listinfo/tos _______________________________________________ tos mailing list [email protected] http://lists.teachingopensource.org/mailman/listinfo/tos
