decause / advfoss Goto Github PK

Basically, we'd have a collection of different projects and assignments to work on, each worth a certain amount of points, and they would add up to our final grade. We would choose between these different options and do enough of them to add up to a certain grade.

There are a number of advantages to this approach:

• A big part of FOSS is about finding niches to fill, but usually we end up doing very similar assignments in scope and size.
• It allows us to plan assignments around when we have time and to either bank work or procrastinate work accordingly, which helps a lot with getting release schedules set up.
• It forces us to be incredibly self-motivated.
• It would encourage us to branch out more and try different things. It's easy with the current setup to do only the requirements and none of the extra stuff like lightning talks.
• It would almost instantly solve the "what grade do I currently have?" problem.
• It would look good on resumes.

The next step would be for me to actually sit down and write up something, which would be about the time when this could be theoretically closed down and I could make the proposal as a commit to the main syllabus. There are a number of concerns with this method that I need to think about and address (getting certain assignments to be required, not allowing people to overload on one type of assignment, not allowing people to get all of them done and then sit around doing nothing, not allowing people to procrastinate on them, etc.. etc...), but I think there are potentially creative ways to deal with those problems without breaking the core mechanics of what the course would turn into.

tl;dr Extend the community contribution model to the entire class structure so that programming projects and blog posts are options, not requirements.

I've been thinking about how assignments work in this class. Some examples of problems I've seen so far:

• I write blog posts that I would never put on my blog otherwise. Example: the project proposals.
• I am required to write a blog post every week, which hurts the quality of some posts I would otherwise invest more time into. Example: my PennApps post-mortem.
• Not all projects fit nicely into the 5 week structure. Oculus D Rift needed more time to reach fruitition, whereas D-language for Atom was completed (start to finish) in about an hour.

All this to say, people have different strengths and weaknesses that allow them to contribute to FOSS in different ways. So, how best to acknowledge that with the grading structure?

An assignment pool.

Present everybody with the options up front. Edit Wikipedia articles, write documentation for FOSS projects, make logos and art assets, create new programs, build a new feature for an existing project. Then allow students to work where they will best contribute and don't penalize them for skipping other parts.

There are issues with this model. Forcing students to blog is an inherently good thing to takeaway from the class. Making students complete a variety of assignments may spark an interest that was previously unknown.

It's also worth noting that this is the model being used for community contributions already. The main difference I am proposing is that programming projects and blog posts be lumped into the pool, and therefore the frequency of contributions (there are 3 for the whole semester) would rise.

Lastly, this issue can count as either a blog post or a community contribution under the current grading scheme which is awesome.

http://foss-advanced.rhcloud.com/hw/commcont

We should link to specific sites like freesound.org, or the sites @decause suggested we submit art or articles to. Basically add more of the resources spoken about in class to the documentation.

It would be nice to have a list of sites were you should packaged based on your language. (PyPi for Python packages, node for Javascript, etc)

At this point, the home page contains

ADVFOSS
The RIT Seminar in IGM Course

which doesn't provide visitors with any helpful information.

Going on to the About page, visitors are greeted with

Hello, world!
This is a wonderful experiment using Twitter Boostrap, Flask, and Mako to make awesome.

and descriptions of Bootstrap, Flask, and Mako... Still not very informative.

Some of the information from the Syllabus page should also be on the home page so that visitors have some idea of what the class is about.

We should have an archived list of past projects in order to serve as inspiration for new students.

scripts/people/ChrisKnepper.yaml has my blog listed as his blog. That should probably be fixed.

Have lightning talks with code snippets. Possibly github gists?

Speak to Mansam about this, we ran into it when he was helping me with a ticket! It is a problem in site.py when you create the resources list

This would be helpful so people don't need to keep looking at SIS.

It would be nice to have a list of past guest lectures as well as future lecturers.

This section would showcase possible mentors for future students as well as some brief bios about the mentors (what they are doing now, skillset, etc.)

It will annoy students enough that they will either do their work, or update their YAML. Cuz when I look at the participants page I'm still seein' some red text :(

CC: @ralphbean @rossdylan @thequbit @mansam @alexanderkyte @chorn

As a couple students mentioned last night, students aren't aware of their grades. @decause does contact students who aren't doing well, and anyone who he hasn't contacted is looking at a B or better, but there's still a lot of uncertainty, especially with the introduction of the plus/minus system.

One solution would be to use MyCourses, but let's be honest, MyCourses is a piece of shit.

I'd like to propose an alternative; GnuPG encrypted grades.

The idea is that as part of the First Flight assignment, students would create a 4096[0] bit GnuPG key pair. There would be a class which would cover GnuPG and it's usage. At the end of the class there would be a key signing party.

Students' grades would be kept up to date and uploaded to the class website. Each student's grade would encrypted, signed, and armored. Encrypted to make sure that grades are confidential, signed to make sure grades are only updated by @decause, and armored to make them viewable in the browser.

Perhaps @ryansb and @liam-middlebrook could add functionality to their command line tool which would simplify the process of updating and publishing grades. The publication of a student's grades in an unencrypted format or the publication of @decause's private key would have dire consequences - if the process could be automated[1] to prevent human error, all the better.

In addition to the increase in transparency by allowing students to see how they are doing in class, it would provide students with an introduction to the usage of and best practices for GnuPG, an important tool in the police state we're quickly approaching.

Any feedback is appreciated.

— @citruspi

P.S. I'll be submitting this issue to the repositories for both HFOSS and AdvFOSS. I'd like to see it implemented in both classes, but I realize that it may be implemented differently for each class or implemented for one class first as a trial and I think having separate issues for each class is important.

[0] Perhaps, for the AdvFOSS class, we could make it even more interesting. In the class where GnuPG is covered, students would also learn to patch GnuPG to increase the key size beyond 4096 bits and then recompile GnuPG.

[1] Aside, of course, from the entry of the passphrase for the private key, because no one would create a private key without a passphrase, right?

Having a page dedicated to all the keys for all the assignments, along with their due dates, would be great, as it would both serve as a list of assignments for forgetful students (read: yours truly), as well as a roadmap for where the course will generally be going for future students.

We already have this in part on the Participants page, but that's both slow to load and only helps for assignments you're already potentially late on.

I know we also sorta kinda have some of this functionality on the Assignments page, but I think it could be made a lot more helpful and robust (not to mention that it was sort of difficult to find the exact assignment you were looking for in HFOSS, because there were more assignments listed).

There's no link in the readme.

It would be great to have an RSS feed for the site content

Calendar would contain things like
-rocpy
-hackathons
-homework assignment due dates
-etc.

Whether this is info entered manually, or something generated programmatically, I think this is a feature that is needed as we often have questions of "when is x" every class. (I myself am responsible for many of them :P )

It needs to include "Proposed License", "Upstream mentors", and the fact that we get bonus points if other people (outside of the RIT foss community) make contributions.

An example YAML file is needed to show students all the necessary blog posts and links for the class

An exit survey at the end of the semester would be help in improving the course and could provide information on student for implementing issue #102.

The template for these lecture notes is also mislabeled.

We're on semesters. While that is unfortunate, we should reflect it in the text.

Initially setting up the Raspberry Pi was kind of confusing since I had never done it before, can we include some good resources for first time Pi users on the site?

So that people don't have to go to the participants page and wait for it to load ;) also this might be convenient enough that it'd encourage students to read each others posts and perhaps comment on them.

@decause mentioned that we should set something for this.