Foundation:Planning:Education

Open source projects help contributors learn incredibly useful skills: how to code; how to collaborate; how to lead in a global community. Despite this, formal links between higher education and open source projects like Mozilla are rare. College and university students who want to take advantage of the resources and mentorship that come with open source development have to do so on their own time.

Mozilla Education aims to change this: we want to build systematic links between our projects and the world of education. Over the long haul, we hope that this will help to drive a new wave of participatory, student-led learning in computer science, design and business schools around the world. In the shorter term, we believe that we can provide students with rich learning opportunities while at the same time generating new ideas and contributors for Mozilla.

The idea is to provide content, mentorship and community infrastructure that make it easier for students, professors and universities to contribute to and learn from Mozilla. At the simplest level, this could include online 'bootcamps' and easy-to-start coding projects for students who want to build an independent study credit around Mozilla. At a larger level, it could involve university departments building significant ongoing programming with Mozilla. What actually happens will depend on where students, educators and Mozillians decide to take this.

Overview

Vision

Computer science, design and business schools around the world drive a new wave of participatory, student-led learning, with open source projects like Mozilla acting as classroom and laboratory.

<To what extent can and should we depend on educational institutions to drive this vision? To what extent can and should we attempt to serve potential students outside the framework of formal classes in institutions?>

Thesis

Over the first half of 2009, we want to test the following thesis by running a number of experimental Mozilla Education projects:

Systematically creating opportunities for students to immerse themselves in our projects will a) produce rich learning outcomes for students and b) garner new ideas and contributors for Mozilla.

We will evaluate on both of these points mid-year to see if this thesis is correct; see below for possible ways to do this.

Context

There has been much talk over the last few years about the link between open source and education. Key things to note include:

• MIT and many others have released 'open source' versions of their course content and materials.
• David Wiley at BYU and many others have started promoting participatory pedagogy that builds on the culture and tools of the internet.
• Some people have started talking about an 'open education movement' that combines open courseware with participatory teaching and learning.
• Open source software has been rolled out widely by schools in Russia, Brasil and Spain.

Despite all of this buzz about 'open' and 'education', there have been few projects that have focused on the fact that participating in open source development is itself a rich, participatory learning experience. The exceptions are:

• Seneca College in Toronto has integrated participation in Mozilla, Fedora and OpenOffice into its computer studies programs.
• Smaller, university-based software projects like AVOIR have grown up with significant participation from students.
• nsf-funded program in the US?
• OSS Watch in the UK have submitted a proposal to the JISC to develop an open education curriculum and mentoring programme embedding open source mentoring into computer science and work based learning (funding decision due end of Feb '09)
• what else?

It's in this area that Mozilla Education wants to focus. A handful of Mozilla community members have expressed interest in working on this. With participation from this group, we can test out the Mozilla Education idea to see if it bears fruit.

Phillip and others: what projects and research can we cite in this second area? What are we missing?

2009 pilots and experiments

<blurb defining what we mean by pilots and experiments>

Seneca Expansion / Virtual Seneca

• Link: Seneca Expansion / Virtual Seneca (online)
• Description: Students anywhere can take advantage of the Seneca / Mozilla learning model, accessing projects, community support and mentoring.
• Benefits and outcomes:
• Products and outputs:
• Resources and participants:

Community-based Online Courses

• Link: Mozilla Community Courses (online)
• Description: Ongoing series online courses run jointly by professors and Mozilla community members, providing opportunities for community building and learning on topics most important to Mozilla at any given moment.
• Benefits and outcomes:
• Products and outputs:
• Resources and participants:

Mozilla in Universities

• Link: Mozilla in Universities (online and ftf) this needs a better name
• Description: this is placeholder for Madrid experiment ... needs to be written up
• Benefits and outcomes:
• Products and outputs:
• Resources and participants:

education.mozilla.org

Also: create Mozilla Education library -> section on mozilla.org existing openly licensed materials that students and professors can use in their courses. Market through existing OER portals. Also, provides window into these other Mozilla Education activities listed above.

Self-organizing activities

something about the fact that people will hopefully self organize beyond the stuff we're trying out here ... example is Gary Kwong's proposed activities at National University of Singapore

Resources and financial setting

• general description of the kind of people and resources we need, pointing to fact that most detail is in the experiment descriptions
• description of kind of resources available already in the educational setting -> there is a ton of opportunity to leverage public funding universities already get
• discussion of opportunity to generate additional funding through grants

Community and participants

<add table>

• Mozilla community
  • Dave Humphrey (module owner type role?)
  • Jason Rendorff
  • Gary Kwong
  • Pascal Chevral
  • Paul Rouget
  • who else?
• Educators
  • people in Madrid
  • Philipp Schmidt, University of the Western Cape
  • David Wiley, Brigham Young
  • who else?

Roadmap

detailed roadmaps for each experiment / pilot are included on the related pages

Q1 2009

xxx

Q2 2009

xxx

Q3 2009

xxx

Q4 2009

xxx

Beyond

xxx

Evaluation

As noted above the two hypotheses we wish to test are that we can

• produce rich learning outcomes for students
• garner new ideas and contributors for Mozilla

We potentially have multiple ways of testing whether students have rich learning outcomes:

• Student self-assessment. For example, we could survey students and ask them (among other things) to rate the value and relevance of their learning experience.
• Instructor assessment. For example, instructors (and mentors) can rate students on their demonstrated levels of enthusiasm, dedication, and achievement.
• Peer assessment. For example, students could nominate classmates for special recognition based on their overall contributions to the class experience.
• Student behavior. For example, we could look at the level of student involvement in class activities as measured by the amount of code checkins, bug comments, forum postings, IRC presence, etc.

We also have several possible ways to measure resulting new ideas and contributors:

• Mentor / module owner assessment. For example, we could ask mentors and/or module owners and peers to rate students and/or their projects based on their level of contribution to project goals.
• Contributor assessment. For example, we could ask Mozilla project contributors in general to nominate students and their projects for special recognition.
• New contributor metrics. For example, we could determine how many students achieve various contributor-related milestones (getting "canconfirm" status on bugs, having patches successfully reviewed and accepted, gaining commit access, etc.). If possible, compare students with a "control group" of contributors who came into the project through more traditional paths.

There are other dimensions on which we might evaluate our overall efforts, for example:

• Student participation. This would measure the overall reach of the program and the extent to which participating students take on more active roles within the project. More specifically, some potential measures include
  • Total number of students who participate to some degree.
  • Number of students who successfully complete at least one substantial project.
  • Number of students who continue participation past the end of their class(es).
  • Number of students who become core project contributors.
• Geographic reach. This would measure the extent to which we can achieve worldwide success in reaching potential student populations.
  • Number of countries with participating institutions.
  • Number of countries with participating students. (This assumes the possibility of some students participating outside a formal institutional framework.)
  • Number of languages in which instruction occurs and for which educational material is localized.
• Institutional adoption. This would measure the extent to which this paradigm is adopted within particular education institutions.
  • Number of instructors participating within given institutions.
  • Number of relevant classes within given institutions.
  • Number of students participating within given institutions.
• Breadth of offerings. This would measure the extent to which instruction occurs beyond just traditional computer science programs. For example, do we have participation by business schools? Design schools? And so on...