If you know any computer science professors at 4-year colleges, please forward this to them!
Yesterday I learned that there's a professor at Seneca College (David Humphrey) teaching a course called Topics in Open Source Development. It's a fourth-year undergrad course. Students do projects for Mozilla, the open source web browser.
Mozilla contributed guest lectures from seven core developers and mentoring for the students. (!)
I met David yesterday. He has taught the course a few times now, to a total of about 100 students, and he has interesting things to say about it, which I won't try to reproduce here. But man. This is the kind of killer course I wish they had at CBU when I was there. Every CS department needs an internship-like course where students do real projects. They must be a pain to develop and run. This is one of the coolest I've ever heard of and more "real-world" than most.
If you're interested in possibly teaching this course at your school, please contact David or me (jason.orendorff@gmail.com). You can also watch the guest lectures online, view the student project list, or read David's Mozilla development crash course.
