Open Source Software To Support Student Teams: Challenges, Lessons, And Opportunities

Team projects have a long history in education, with an extensive literature. Appropriate tools and procedures can support team projects, and open source software tools present specific opportunities and challenges. Open source software (OSS) generally refers to software that is distributed without charge and with the original source code, so that anyone can fix defects, add enhancements, or otherwise modify the software and share their changes with others. Thus, OSS can be freely installed on any number of computers, and modified by faculty and students with appropriate knowledge, but it may include less documentation, require more expertise to install and maintain, and be more difficult to evaluate than commercial alternatives. Since team projects usually involve multiple activities, teams can use multiple tools and try to make them work well together, or teams can use tools that support multiple functions. We focus on tools that can support collaboration (sharing documents and information) and coordination (keeping track of which team members are doing what tasks). In particular, we review previous work and describe recent experiences using wikis, version control systems, task tracking systems, and combinations of these tools. We describe key features, effective practices, supporting activities and assignments, and student outcomes. We also summarize best practices, lessons learned, and directions for future experimentation and development. Using OSS tools helps students learn to use new tools, exposes them to tools or types of tools they are likely to encounter in the future, and enables them to attempt and complete more ambitious projects under more realistic conditions. Like any tools, OSS requires an ongoing time investment by faculty, but helps them to diagnose and correct problems, assess student performance, and help the projects and teams adapt to other factors.