to any papers or research about the percent of universities that are teaching open source software as part of the computer science education and/or those which are using open source in general in their university. I've found lots of resources that indicate that it's important to use open source, but I have yet to find any specific papers with percentages of those teaching/using it.
Measuring "teaching open source" activity has many of the same problems as measuring "using open source" activity -- since it's an open process with no registration, training, etc. requirements, there's no central authority or definitive number. Which makes our lives as researchers a little harder. ;)
That having been said, there might be some things we can point you to that could help paint a better picture (like the paper Gregorio linked to -- thanks, Gregorio, I hadn't seen that one before!) Carol, are you looking for...
* universities/colleges using open source in their IT infrastructure (I'm guessing no, but this would be one of the easier ones to chase down; iirc there are Red Hat sales folks dedicated to education accounts and they might be able to give numbers of some sort)
* universities/colleges using open source as part of classroom infrastructure, at the individual professor level -- a faculty member setting up a Linux lab, or a Mediawiki instance for his/her department, or having students blog on a common class Planet -- where students may use FLOSS software, but it's incidental to the primary learning goals (somewhat impossible to measure, except anecdotally or from stats from edu-focused projects like Moodle)
* universities/colleges with classes that focus specifically on teaching the *use* of open source tools (graphic design through Inkscape instead of Photoshop, etc -- and do classes focused on open source programming languages like Python count? Again, pretty impossible to measure)
* universities/colleges with classes that focus on having students *contribute* to FLOSS projects (patching Firefox, doing requirements analysis for RTEMS, testing GNOME betas, hosting Ubuntu installfests, etc?) I think most people here focus on this last category. In terms of frequency of that in North America, this is a *very* partial count, but there are...
* 10 HFOSS institutions, according to http://www.hfoss.org/index.php/chapters_list * 71 POSSE alumni (some from the HFOSS institutions, some from others) before the summer of 2012; the number is closer to 100 now * multiple academic centers/institutes/etc focused on FLOSS -- I can think of OSU, RPI, and RIT right now but am probably missing some. Again, some overlap. And also note that all those faculty/institutions may not have active classes/programs at this very moment.
But as a rough order of magnitude, let's grossly underestimate 100 faculty, anywhere in the world, actively teaching FLOSS contribution in their classes right now. Let's say each of them does this for at least one class, that the average class size is 25 students, and that students spend an average of 9 hours a week on that professor's class. Then we're looking at 100*25*9*2 = 45,000 student-hours, or the equivalent of 23,4375 full-time jobs (40 hours per week, 48 weeks per year). And that's very, very, *very* much an underestimate (and only looks at student-hours, not professor-hours -- and only looks at classes, not clubs or capstones or co-ops or research), but probably falls within the order-of-magnitude ballpark.
Maybe a better question is what you're trying to use this sort of data for. :)
--Mel _______________________________________________ tos mailing list [email protected] http://lists.teachingopensource.org/mailman/listinfo/tos
