1. Experiences with Distributed Open Source Courses Kirsti Ala-Mutka & Tommi Mikkonen Tampere University of Technology Institute of Software Systems

2. Overview of the presentation Motivation Course as a project entity Open Source Courseware project Course material bank Distributed course organization Experiences on a trial course Conclusion

3. Motivation Rapid development of the field of information technology Increasing number of students Lack of teaching resources Constantly changing teaching personnel Need to assure the contents and development of courses All universities face same problems in their software engineering education

4. Course as a project entity Each course has an own identity, disk space, loginname, WWW-pages Course related materials are not personalized to a certain teacher Course is carried out as a project with regular staff meetings and reports Experiences have proved this to be a good model if teaching staff changes or the course is transferred to another university

5. Open Source Courseware project 2002-2004 Develops a model for co-operative course development between universities –course material bank –course organization model Helps to develop up-to-date software engineering education Participants: Tampere University of Technology, University of Tampere, Oulu University First 4 courses are given on 2002

6. Course material bank All materials are produced with Open Source principles (Gnu FDL) Contains all course materials (transparencies, exercises, model solutions, etc.) Instructions for material usage Reports and feedback of previous courses Courses are divided into subsections for better reusability

7. Distributed course organization One university is responsible for lectures and overall course management Remote universities have staff to take care of local tutoring and administration Lectures are delivered by videoconferencing, tutorials are organized locally Regular staff meetings are essential in managing the multi-site course project

9. Experiences from a trial course Spring 2002: Programming of mobile devices, 4.5 ECTS cu 3 sites, 150 students, 10 teachers Contained lectures, exercises, project work Student feedback was concentrated in course contents, not technical issues Also students that work besides studying could more easily take the course Both students and course personnel considered the experience positive

10. Exam score distribution

11. Conclusion The model supports well traditional university contact education Cost savings despite of coordination work Course materials and contents must be planned, documented and archived very carefully  good for course development in general Next year this course will be given again with similar implementation model

12. Questions? Thank you for your attention! Contact information: kirsti.ala-mutka@tut.fi tommi.mikkonen@tut.fi Tampere University of Technology Institute of Software Systems