FOSS In Courses Activity

When many people think about including FOSS in a class, they are typically thinking of one of two things:

1. Finding an artifact from the FOSS project such as a code segment that provides the base for study within the classroom (e.g., code review), or
2. Making a code contribution to the project by fixing a bug or making an enhancement.

However, there are myriad different activities based on FOSS as well as ways of contributing to FOSS projects that go beyond coding. The purpose of this activity is to explore some of the other ways to introduce students to and/or involve students in FOSS projects.

Observing some of the different activities and ways to contribute starts with understanding what these are. Helpful resources for new developers trying to learn about it are:

1. Andy Lester's 14 Ways to Contribute to Open Source without Being a Programming Genius or a Rock Star
2. Craig Buchek's great list of ways to contribute other than code
3. The list of activities on the 50 Ways to be a FOSSer page

For educational purposes, there are further resources to draw from:

1. There is a set of learning activities
2. TeachingOpenSource has a Teaching Materials Catalog
3. Steve Jacobs at RIT has a Open Source Course

For OpenMRS in my course, activities or topics that I am interested in are:

• The introductory assignments as we are doing right now for POSSE.
• Solving introductory issues across the system to get students used to the way of working in this particular project and to get them set up with the development environment.
• Bigger topic or module: I am not sure which one to choose here.

Existing materials for those activities are:

• Introductory assignments: Intro to FOSS, project anatomy (and evaluation), learn IRC and other types of channels or forums, version control (git), bug tracking (also on github)
• Solving introductory issues requires the list thereof and the new developers guide
• The to-be-chosen bigger topic requires the technical overview of the project and then more documentation on that active project or module.