There is often a mismatch between student preparation and industry expectation in computer science. Most undergraduate computer science students produce toy programs and algorithms, work alone, and find themselves paradoxically out of place when they hit the job market where team development is the norm. In response to this dilemma, Loyola Marymount University (LMU) is adopting an open source development culture as the ideal environment for undergraduate computer science education through an Open Source Teaching Framework (OSTF).
Through OSTF, LMU is developing a set of teaching methods based on open source principles and an accompanying hardware and software infrastructure to support these methods. LMU is adapting OSTF to five upper-division courses and three lower-division courses. OSTF is specifically addressing the need to provide undergraduate computer science students with coursework and experience that more closely match the team-oriented, large-scale software development paradigm that exists in industry. OSTF is training students to organize and document their code with the explicit knowledge that this code will be seen, used, and installed by others.
Intellectual Merit. The OSTF is advancing knowledge of effective software quality control and integrating this knowledge into the undergraduate curriculum.
Broader Impacts. The OSTF infrastructure and framework is being distributed to other institutions. Any institution may adopt the project's open source style of teaching, training, and learning in the same way that any developer may contribute to open source software: just "sign up and download."
