In Collaborative Open Source Summer Experience, Professors Forge Community of Practice

(This post is the third in the "Voices of POSSE" series, a collection of interviews conducted at this year's Professors' Open Source Summer Experience, held in Raleigh, NC on July 23-24.)

Prof. Richard Ilson thinks the traditional software engineering course is broken, its blueprints horribly outdated. Working on large software development projects is more complicated than most people think, he said, and teaching students to do it with textbooks alone just doesn't prepare them for professional positions.

"The principles of software engineering are not like the principles of electrical engineering," said Ilson, who teaches software engineering at The University of North Carolina at Charlotte. "It's like an art, a seat-of-the-pants thing." In other words, it requires gut instinct as much as technical skill. And that makes it all the more difficult to teach.

Luckily, at this year's Professors' Open Source Summer Experience (POSSE), Ilson found a group that shares his sentiments and understands the challenges associated with teaching software engineering in traditional college classrooms...