1. 1 Open Source Courseware (OSCu) project 6.6.2003 Kirsti Ala-Mutka TUT/Institute of Software Systems

2. 2 Open Source Courseware project 2002-2004 Helps to develop up-to-date software engineering education Develops a model for co-operative course development between universities –course material bank –course organization model At the moment 6 participating universities in Finland, 4-5 distributed courses a year Aims at developing a cooperation model that can become a part of normal university activities

3. 3 Background Rapid development in 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 kind of problems in IT education TUT had already developed some approaches to deal with these problems

4. 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. 5 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 Course materials are divided into subsections for better reusability

6. 6 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

8. 8 Experiences this far 4 courses 2002, 5 courses 2003, 70-200 students per course Technical problems with videoconferencing Active coordination between course personnel in different universities is a necessity Course personnel workload can be surprisingly high Both students and course personnel have given mainly positive feedback Learning results have been similar in all universities

9. 9 An exam score distribution 2002

10. 10 An exam score distribution 2003

11. 11 Conclusion The OSCu model supports well traditional university contact education Course materials and contents must be planned, documented and archived very carefully  good for course development in general Requires careful instructions and motivated personnel with enough time Brings better quality courses and possibilities for wider course selection, not especially cost savings

12. 12 Codewitz network Began by developing interactive visualization materials for programming education at Tampere Polytechnic Opened as a worldwide open source material bank 2001 Participants from China, Russia, Latvia, Island, France, Germany... Aims at collaborative development of interactive WWW-materials for introductory programming education

13. 13 Questions? Thank you for your attention! More information: http://www.cs.tut.fi/~oscu/ http://www.codewitz.net/ Contact information: kirsti.ala-mutka@tut.fi Tampere University of Technology Institute of Software Systems