Guest Editorial Open-Source Software for Engineering Education: Pedagogical Strategies That Leverage Open-Source Tools

V AST numbers of students and other people interested in learning resources can now exploit learning infrastructures and learning designs on the Web. Even larger learning resources reside in universities' and organizations' intranets and Web-accessible e-learning systems. As the amount of learning content available on the Web continues to grow rapidly, it is increasingly important to define effective methods and strategies that will exploit this content for the promotion of sound pedagogy. Especially in computer engineering education, this requirement relates to the critical need to enhance and promote the development of student skills and competencies. The open-source software (OSS) paradigm encompasses a new philosophy for the enhancement of collaborative efforts and also provides a wide range of solutions to real-world problems. The technical approaches underlying such solutions usually come from communities of researchers and reflect their consensus on the social character of IT artifacts. Just as OSS is beginning to empower and energize learning solutions , the underlying principles and technologies can enhance a new era of pedagogical strategies. In this special issue of IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON EDUCATION, we focus on the new possibilities the OSS paradigm affords for improved computer engineering education and technology-enhanced learning. Free and open-source software (FOSS) has received growing attention in recent years from various perspectives. The dramatic increase in OSS adoption and contribution has galvanized the engineering education researchers who, in recent years, have been trying to decipher the phenomenon of OSS, its relation to already-conducted research, and its implications for new research opportunities that affect classroom instruction. The current OSS landscape presents a very interesting picture. Although the idea behind OSS dates back to the 1960s and the Unix era in the 1980s, the term OSS was not coined until 1998. Since then, the OSS movement has evolved at a very fast pace. Prime examples of successful OSS projects include development tools (GNU toolchain, Eclipse). These widely-accepted OSS endeavors demonstrate that a wide range of OSS applications are available and that they present a viable and robust alternative to proprietary software solutions. Many applications of FOSS for education are also available. Worldwide initiatives, such as Sakai, and a great number of the so-called open-learning management systems, challenge engineering education. The objective of this special issue is to communicate and disseminate recent engineering education research in this area, as well as the success stories that demonstrate the power of OSS to improve traditional engineering …