The growing influence of open source movement – the collaborative effort by which developers freely contribute and distribute software codes — has caught up with the local education sector as five tertiary institutions made a deal to promote the technology in their curriculum.
The move is a result of a nationwide program, dubbed Philippine Open Source Initiative (Positive), whose aim is to spur the promotion and adoption of Open Source technologies for application users, network administrators, and software developers.
Don Bosco Technical College, Cebu Institute of Technology, Asia Pacific College, Angeles University Foundation, and Mindanao State University-Iligan Institute of Technology were the first signatories of the project.
Positive is an initiative of the German Technical Cooperation (GTZ), Wireless Services Asia (WSA), and the European IT Service Center (EITSC). It focuses on promotions, advocacy, and capacity-building by incorporating open source courses in information technology and computer engineering curriculum of academic institutions in the country.
The core idea in Positive’s goals is to strengthen the open source skills of the country’s IT graduates who will fill specific demands for local and offshore requirements.
Under the agreement, the five schools will jointly develop an open source technologies track in their course curricula. The schools will also work on curriculum development with Positive’s private sector partners, who may have specific skills requirements for its IT employees.
The schools will then collaborate with these private sector partners to create an open source courseware, eventually implementing a pilot test of the curriculum in their own schools. Private sector partners will also undergo an open source shortcourse training provided by Positive to enlighten them on adopting open source applications in their operations.
Joseph Paul Sianghio, project lead of Positive, said the development of the open source curriculum would be done in phases. "The courseware itself would be modified depending on the capability of the school as well as the specific needs of the private sector partners."
On-campus promotional activities on the Positive project will then be conducted to introduce the revised open source courseware in time for the next school year 2006.
Sianghio added that by the end of 2006, there would have been at least 45 students from the partner schools doing internship in companies, while at least 20 students would be fully employed.
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