From Teaching Open Source
POSSE 2011 cohort members are eligible to access a Teaching Open Source grant of up to $1600 USD of funding for their class. This page outlines the eligibility requirements to receive the grant and the procedure for administrating it.
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[edit] Course eligibility criteria
[edit] You must be teaching the course in 2011-2012
You must personally be teaching the course during the 2011-2012 school year to the Summer 2011 workshop. We want to work with professors on the classes they're already scheduled to teach, because (1) you already have enough work to do without proposing and creating a brand new course, and (2) we want to give you tools you can use to get started on the classes you are teaching now.
This class does not have to be open-source focused courses (though we'll take those too). It has to be related to computer science and/or software engineering, that's all. Do you have an introductory programming course? Senior capstones? Computational thinking for non-majors? Databases, programming languages, data structures and algorithms, object-oriented programming, natural language processing, software engineering and project management, interface design, networking, discrete math? What will you be teaching anyway? Bring that.
[edit] You must complete all required POSSE modules
You must successfully complete all required POSSE modules before the end of your chosen class. After the weekend POSSE basics workshop, follow-up modules on common tools and practices encountered by newcomers to an open source community will be offered. These modules have been designed in response to common faculty and student questions and are typically topics we've been asked to guest-lecture on in the past. There are 5 required core modules and a variety of electives, of which you must choose 2; modules take between 2-3 hours each to complete in total, and will be offered with flexible scheduling throughout the summer and school year. Modules may be taken in any order.
You can complete modules before your course starts, incorporate them into your course and take them alongside your students, or a combination of the two. For instance, you might complete all 7 modules (5 core + 2 elective) before your course begins, or complete none before your course begins and incorporate all 7 into the curriculum of your course, or complete 3 before your course begins and integrate the remaining 4 into your course, or any other combination. The intent is that since you'll likely have to be teaching your students these basic skills/processes/tools anyway, we're trying to make it as easy for you to do so as possible - you'll have additional people around to field your students' questions, freely remixable worksheets and resources for learning various common tools, and so forth.
[edit] The class must have a blog
The class must have at least one publicly-viewable blog. We'll help you set this up over the summer; if you haven't blogged before, it will take you less than 10 minutes to create both your blog and your first post. This will be a place where the ongoing story of your class is told, in real time - whether posts are written by students, faculty, or open source community members working with the class does not matter, but we'll expect at least 3 (start, middle, and end) posts on that blog about the class during the semester it runs. The licensing of your blog content is up to you; we strongly encourage an open content license and will help you pick one during your workshop weekend, but it's your decision in the end.
[edit] The class must contribute directly to an upstream project
Students in your class must contribute directly in the public infrastructure of the open source project they are working on. This isn't to say that you shouldn't have a class mailing list - you probably should, because you'll want to tell students when assignments are due, when class is moving outside to the lawn, when guests will be coming to class, and so forth. But your students should be "out there," working within the open source community, hanging out in the project's IRC channels, speaking up on its mailing lists, editing its wiki, using its ticket trackers, and pushing their patches upstream just like any other contributor.
Contributions do not have to be code - documentation, design, testing, translation, training, release management, marketing, journalism, research, and many other types of contributions are more than welcome!
[edit] The syllabus must be released under an open license
The course syllabus document must be released under an open content license. You may remove personally identifying information from the document before releasing it. We'll try to make it as easy as possible for you to also distribute new materials (assignments, etc) created for your course under an open content license, but you're under no obligation to do so - and the class may, of course, utilize preexisting non-open-licensed content such as textbooks. However, we need to have something that lists your course's scheduling, topics, required texts, assessment policies, and so forth - whatever you hand out to your students is fine, and you don't need to have it before you apply, just open-license it and send it in when you do have it.
[edit] Grant administration
Once your plan for fulfilling the course funding eligibility requirements (above) have been approved (during the POSSE Basics workshop in July 2011), you'll have up to $1600 USD to spend on (almost) anything you'd like for your course.
[edit] What you can't spend it on
- Salary or stipends, including instructor and TA salaries.
- Closed-source software, except when delivered as part of a device (for instance, embedded software on a video camera purchased for a class, etc). We're reasonable folks and trust your judgement; for instance buying a box version of a proprietary word processor definitely falls outside the allowed bounds of the grant... but if you get a netbook that happens to come pre-loaded with a closed-source operating system and plan to reflash it with Linux for development, we're not going to get nitpicky and excise the cost of that software from your reimbursement.
- Anything illegal/unethical, though that goes without saying.
- That's about it.
When in doubt if something's ok, ask! It probably is.
[edit] What you can spend it on
Pretty much everything else related to your class. For instance, you might...
- Fly in and host an engineer from the project your students are working on, allowing them to meet and work with their remote mentor in person for a few days.
- Buy pizza and t-shirts and burn CDs for a hackathon or release party on campus.
- Purchase hardware for your students to develop on.
- Take your students to a conference to present their work.
- Do you have any other ideas? Let us know!
[edit] Procedure
During your POSSE Basics workshop in Summer 2011, you'll be assigned a Red Hat grant administrator. When you decide to spend part of your course grant, do the following:
- Email the Teaching Open Source list with a short description of what you're purchasing and why. This isn't long or formal (2-4 sentences is sufficient). It's intended to give other professors an idea of the kinds of things they might decide to do with
- Spend money! You do not need to wait for confirmation of your decision before proceeding - it's your grant to spend. You can do this in one of two ways:
- Buy the item yourself, then contact your designated Red Hat grant administrator with the receipt; you will be reimbursed via PayPal.
- Contact your designated Red Hat grant administrator with specifics on how to purchase the required items, and the item will be obtained and sent to you with no further paperwork required.
- Receive your purchase. Enjoy!
We usually have pretty quick turnaround (average time is ~48 hours between contacting the grant administrator and getting a reimbursement or a purchase confirmation); at latest, you'll get it 2 Fridays after contacting your grant administrator.
We recommend discussing your purchases on the Teaching Open Source mailing list a few days before actually spending the money. Other community members may have recommendations on what to purchase, how to save money, etc. However, this is not required.
[edit] Timeline
The spending cutoff for grants is February 1, 2013. This is so that spring 2012 courses can utilize the funding to continue or present work from the class over the summer or in the following fall semester.
There is no requirement to spend your grant all at once; you may spend it in a spontaneous or pre-planned manner anytime before the spending cutoff.