Limitations

Open source: not the be-all and end-all

Unfortunately, going open-source does not automatically solve every educational issue, nor does it save an existing project that suffers from ill-defined goals or spaghetti code or any of software engineering’s other chronic ills. As Jamie Zawinski, ex-principal of the Mozilla project, correctly observed: ”Open-source is not magic pixie dust” [S.00]. In 1999, Zawinski resigned from the Mozilla project, complaining of poor management and misopportunities. At that time, Mozilla was still far from passing the critical threshold to production usability. However, recently, it has become a great success, one of the leading open-source projects that is well-respected in the CSSE community and delivers top-notch products (web-browsers, email clients and enterprise-grade bug tracking software).

Mozilla has managed to provide an example simultaneously of how open source can succeed and how it could fail. Whether the model can succeed, either in the industry or in an educational environment, largely depends on the human factor: those responsible for implementing it and its users.

Reluctance to curriculum changes

Implementing this new model, or introducing anything new to the curricula for that matter, is not a simple task. According to Gruba et al., universities and CSSE staff are reluctant to change their syllabi due to staff issues such as the availability of suitably qualified staff and workload, and the pressure from student subject evaluations, both of which often are the result of financial matters.

Sessional staff, such as tutors, may not be qualified to teach the new materials. Even experienced senior staff may need to be retrained to run new or updated subjects. This is costly for the departments and therefore changes to the syllabi are often not being considered.

Staff workload is another issue. Gruba et al. note the lack of willingness among staff to add to their teaching load to design and offer new subjects. Moreover, staffs are under pressure from the university student subject evaluations. Those who cannot consistently maintain average scores higher than ”neutral” are hindered in their search for promotion, and the department itself are penalised finacially. Due to this, understandably, they are reluctant to initiate change, to experiment with innovative teaching techniques, or to teach challenging material.

Student abilities

Ideally, all students should have the right material needed for educators to deploy the curricula that create graduates of the highest possible calibre. However, Gruba et al. show that the exigencies of filling quotas for both local and international students mean that the weaker students in the courses
sometimes do not meet the expectations in terms of maths or English skills, or in breadth of knowledge in other ways. Facing the open-source curricula that stresses the development of communication, technical writing skills and various other soft skills could be too overwhelming for such students. Hence, educators usually take the path of least resistance and have to drop revolutionary ideas for the curricula to cater not for the excellent students that they remember years later but for the mediocre ones that muddle their way through the course, never excelling and sometimes failing.

Designing and implementing an open-source CSSE educational model is a big task, and the details of which are beyond the scope of our paper. We acknowledge these limitations, which can be the obstacles to the success of incorporating open-source practices in CSSE curricula. To further explore this incorporation, we will need to conduct additional feasibility study of this model by interviewing more stakeholders of CSSE education at universities, as well as examples and analyses of similar incorporations at other universities around the globe. These tasks will be left for a future paper to address.