Funding Support for Instructors

Revision as of 20:08, 8 January 2015

Developing Student Participation in HFOSS

Funding Support for some Initial Contributions

The vision for foss2serve is to build a community of faculty and students who will participate in HFOSS projects as part of the students’ education, and as an opportunity for the institutions to make a meaningful contribution to society. As that community develops, instructors will participate in foss2serve at a variety of levels. There is a core team that has been working to create and organize foss2serve.org. To build a community of any size, there needs to be an extended team that also makes significant contributions to the effort, particularly with regard to developing learning materials. Over the long run, the success of the community will depend on voluntary contributions, but there is some funding available to support and encourage some of the early contributions. This document outlines that funding support.

Expectations

The goal of this funding is to quicken the pace of growth and help the foss2serve community reach a sustainable size. The expectation is that the funding will support creation of teaching and learning materials and perhaps some other specific resources, that will be available to the entire community.

Framework of activities – Each project year some two-year and four-year undergraduate instructors will receive funding to develop and pilot learning activities. The background assumption is that these instructors will be participants in foss2serve including:

• Training – participation in a POSSE or similar training event (prior FOSS experience may substitute)
• Stage 3 small group participation – participating in instructor learning groups that will operate throughout this process

The funding will be for accomplishing the following steps in collaboration with core team members:

• Developing learning activities – including participation in course material sprints as appropriate
• Pilot testing and evaluating learning materials – use and refinement of learning materials including conducting evaluations
• Sharing learning materials – packaging materials (including adding metadata and evaluation data) and making them available under an open documentation license via foss2serve.org to any interested instructors
• Dissemination – participating as appropriate in dissemination activities such as conference panels, workshops, or other publications that help more instructors to learn about foss2serve and evaluation results

The structure of these activities will be defined appropriately for each participating instructor based on the nature of their participation.

Funding Support

There is funding available to provide instructor stipends of up to $3,000 per instructor for foss2serve contributions. Funding is generally limited to instructors at U.S. institutions and payment is contingent on actually completing the proposed activities.

There is also some funding to cover travel and lodging to participate in team meetings or dissemination activities. Instructors may apply for either or both types of support.

Application

Instructors interested in obtaining support as extended team members should write a short proposal describing what they would accomplish using this template. The goal is to keep this process simple and easy, and any interested instructors are encouraged to discuss ideas informally before needing to create a more formal description. The proposal should generally contain:

• Name and contact information
• Summary description of proposed contribution. This should be a brief first cut. The expectation is that some of the details are part of the work to be done.
  • Target course(s) or student audience (e.g., major or level), and number of students participating
  • Type(s) of learning activities
  • Expected learning outcomes
  • Thoughts on evaluating the materials
  • Particular expected end products (e.g., assignments, lecture slides with instructor notes)
• Expected schedule, e.g., activities by semester
• Requested funding (within the maximum shown above). Please consider the scope of your proposal when determining the amount to request.

Approved Proposals

• IRC in the Curriculum
• CS2/Data Structures
• Open Source Course
• Software Engineering Labs