Experiences with Distributed Open Source Courses

The field of information technology extends continuously. This implies an increased number of IT professionals as well as rapidly evolving technologies. In universities, the challenge is to manage increasingly large student groups, while at the same time the teachers need to use a lot of time in developing new IT courses and updating the old courses. Unfortunately, many universities face the lack of teaching resources to deal with the situation. To address these problems we have started an Open Source Courseware (OSCu) project. The fundamental goal of the project is to increase cooperation between universities in course development. In this project we produce open source course materials, and use these materials for distributing courses to several universities. The distributed course model offers universities an easy and inexpensive way to broaden their course selection and to distribute knowledge between teaching personnel from different universities. This paper introduces the principles of the course material production and the distributed course organization in the OSCu project. We also discuss the issues noticed when planning and implementing our first course according these principles during spring 2002.