Software engineering education in universities often faces a lack of teaching personnel because of the large number of students and the wide area covered by teaching subjects. Many universities use students and researchers as teaching assistants on courses, which again leads to the problem of constantly changing personnel. To make the situation worse, the whole field of software engineering is constantly developing and courses should be continuously updated and new ones created in order for the university to be able to provide up-to-date education that creates professionals for their field.

These problems are common to many universities and were the reason for starting a project to find solutions for them using university cooperation. In Open Source Courseware (OSCu) project universities can share the work of developing courses and thus more easily increase the number of different courses for students. The project consists of two major components, a course material bank and a distributed course implementation model for utilizing the common materials ina course distrubuted to several universities at the same time. Also individual course material production and development is encouraged. The idea is to pursue similar university course development practices as in open source software development, so that anyone can develop existing solutions further.

It is not uncommon to publish course materials so as to make them available for others. Many universities have been doing this for years on their course webpages. At the moment there are several initiatives that produce and deliver course materials and packages both for contact education and web-based learning solutions, e.g. MIT OpenCourseWare and UNIVERSAL. The goals of the OSCu materials are, however, more extensive. The project aims to provide enough information for another teacher to really take the course, teach it to students and develop it further. The teaching materials are equipped with documents regarding their intended use, experiences and feedback received from the course as well as metadata descriptions of the contents.

However well-documented the materials are, they may still not have enough information for a teacher who is not very familiar with the subject or has never seen these materials in use. For this reason a distributed course model was developed to offer universities the possibility to become acquainted with the issues related to the course in practice. In this model one university is responsible for designing the course, developing and updating the materials for it, controlling the progress of the course and implementing the lectures via videoconferencing for all universities. The remote universities have local tutors to take care of the local organizing issues, exercise sessions and all tutoring tasks for their students.

With this model remote universities can offer their students courses that they could not have developed themselves. The local tutor receives the teaching materials and instructions for the teaching situation from the organizing university. After a few years of participating in a course in this fashion the tutor has enough knowledge for organizing a course by her/himself. This is practical knowledge and expertise sharing between universities. Students and teachers at the remote universities obtain new knowledge and the organizing university receives versatile feedback for their course development. With well-documented materials it is also possible to transfer courses between universities so that the materials get updated and improved also by other persons than the original creators.

The project organization has two levels. The executive group consists of representatives from all the universities in the project and its main task is making decisions on the guidelines and funding issues for the project. Each course is a subproject, managed by the organizing university. The organizing university is responsible for all the issues related to the general organizing, designing and implementation of the course. Remote universities are responsible for carrying out their part of the tutoring, reporting and feedback collection according to the given instructions. The OSCu project coordinator develops guidelines and ensures that all the actors have a correct understanding of the project goals and guidelines and of their tasks on the courses.

More information on the project ideas, technical implementation and experiences can be found in the article that was published in EUNIS2002.

Last modified: Wednesday, 17-Dec-2003 22:18:26 EET