Computer Science students are not learning the skills they need for working in the modern free and open source-friendly of software development, says Scott Wilson, service manager at OSS Watch, a service for higher and further education institutions in the UK. “Institutions need to rethink how they teach computing, to ensure students can practice the craft of software development, such as the use of source control, issue tracking and test-driven development, rather than just programming languages.”
OSS Watch is one of the organisations involved in the VALS Semester of Code, aiming to get European universities and their Computer Science students to work on real business problems that are raised by companies and open source groups. The project is organised for the second time and involves the University of Salamanca (Spain), the University of Bolton (United Kingdom), the University of Udine (Italy) and the University of Cyprus.
The four universities provide academic credit to their students for participating in the coding project. For the students, the VALS project provides real-world programming experience.
The first VALS semester of code took place in 2014, attracting over 250 projects. For this year’s second semester, many of the same project are used. “We don’t yet know the total number of students that are participating in the second semester, the projects are still recruiting”, says Wilson. ”However, we'll do a full review of whether the approach would scale up to an EU level when the pilot is completed.”
Mainstream
The coding project is organised by the Virtual Alliances for Learning Society, which aims to “create an open source software education process methodology and guidelines”. The project also wants to build long-term alliances between universities and companies in open source, hoping to make the approach mainstream.
“The motivation behind the VALS project has its origin in a need, shared by all partners, to forge greatly improved links between higher education students and their teachers, and on the other hand the businesses where those students will find employment”, VALS explains on its website. “In this the consortium is representative of a much wider challenge facing European industry in the education of tomorrow’s knowledge workers, and their integration in the workplace.”
The project is supported by the Lifelong Learning Programme of the European Union.