Free Software Engineering Graduation

The idea isn't about a new thing, its just about doing things in different ways. What is one of the older business in the world? Education, teaching. People have been teaching and learning through all our existence as a species. Its fundamental for our society a good learning system. My idea is to develop a new Software Engineering graduation (although it may be applied to graduations of other areas).

It will be based on open source projects, being the students exposed to their internals to learn each of the technologies and techniques underneath. The courses are taught by important participants in these projects, these persons will be recruited in a partial time basis to be the chairmans of each of the courses. They would be supported by younger guys (also strong participants in the project) that are starting their career as software developers and have therefore different possibilities to work full time in such a job (also do not need big and fat salaries). The students will learn operating systems programing and design hacking linux or BSD internals (also, possibly contributing). The teachers will be driven to accept by being totally involved in their greatest interests, the projects to which they devote their free times.

For the companies involved in these projects - creators and supporters, like IBM (linux - OSs, eclipse - dev tools, Globus - Grid computing), Sun (java - programming languages, netbeans - dev tools, OpenOffice - tools, User interface), RedHat (linux), Wasabi (NetBSD - OSs), Apple (Darwin - OSs), JBoss Group (JBoss - J2EE), Microsoft (C# - programming languages), France Telecom (Enhydra), etc [many more], the interests are huge, these projects will have more work hours (chairmans and assistants are dedicated more directly to their work), more trained people (the students will be familiar with the projects and technologies in the end of the courses), more quality assurance (what is the maxima of free software, the more eyes go through a piece of code the more the code quality improves), projection (their software projects are more famous, more high quality and have more people involved).

The costs of the whole graduation would be taken near zero due to the possibility of obtaining big cooperation from the players involved and due to the whole infrastructure being near your fingertips - the Net and access to it. The students would have the possibility to work with the project of their choice and would be evaluated while doing it. They could study where ever they want since their wok is based totally in e-learning. The whole infrastructure is in-place (sort of speak). The open source development projects have a big associated platform that will support the big course structure. The teachers are familiar with it and are perfectly prepared also to take care of the greater details of registering the students to learn from the project.

The students participation will be developed in specific branches that would only go to production if the chairman wants to, if they have the needed quality and are useful.

The assistants would work with the students, providing help to their works and assignments. They could also teach in the early stages of the courses. To be capable of teaching, both the chairmans and the assistants need to have a complete view of the project.