The OpenSE project is about setting up a new service for open and participatory learning for Software Engineering (SE). The focus on SE (a related project OpenEd is looking a other subjects than Software Engineering) enables openSE to take a different approach to open learning by linking up to the already active open source community. This allows the learners to take part as genuine members of the developer community – not necessarily developing code as there are other activities such as writing documentation and testing the software. Andreas Meiszner (A PhD student at the OU as well as key participant in this project) has developed some interesting models of the ways in which this sort of activity supports learning in his thesis work and in the earlier FLOSSCom EU project. OpenSE is building an environment to support this model and help bring out the learning that occurs.

The second meeting of the project took place at Oxford University Computing Service 4&5 February 2010.
Over the two days we talked about the way an existing experiment the netgeners site can become more supportive of student. There was a lot covered so just to pick out a couple of points:

1.     The impact of a single student who is enthusiastic came up. At Aristotle University in Thessaloniki they had the case of a student who was taking part in an open source project who was “promoted” to co-developer and was proud of his progress. The result was that he made a lot of information available and set a standard for those who were working on this.  While it is not a core of the project how to get people to follow such leads is an interesting challenge and led to discussion of how to use develop measures of reputation. This is also an important element of the iSpot system.

2.     As always at events like this everyone in the room is also involved in other interesting thing. Wouter ? from the FKI are running a Free Technology Academy that offers taught courses based on open resources. As I understand it these are open course but anyone can pay to get access to support and a certificate. Two things struck about this work:

a.     The certificates can be “traded” for credit from participating universities (including OUNL and OUC).

b.     They have recruited more than 30 paying students – this is not theory it is really happening!