Leveraging COVID-19 in the Classroom

As the summer progresses, I’m finding a new rhythm to preparing my fall classes.  It is clear that even though my institution is hoping to hold the majority of classes in person, I need to be able to take all of my classes online at any moment. And yes, the does mean that class preparation is at least doubled.

I have been focusing on my Software Engineering course which is a fairly standard coverage of Requirements, Design, Test, etc.  In my case, I am setting students up for their Capstone class which meets in the spring term. In Capstone, students will be contributing to the Bear Necessities Market which is an HFOSS application to support the food pantry located on Western New England University’s campus.  BNM is one of several food pantry applications being developed by instructors within the Libre Food Pantry community. In my Software Engineering course, we use BNM to investigate real-world requirements, design, test and more. We also learn the environment of a real HFOSS project so that students are able to make code contribution in the Capstone course.

As I’ve been thinking about how to best support learning, I realized that, due to COVID-19, the BNM will Likely need to implement some form of a visit schedule in order to support social distancing as our pantry has very limited space. I can see lots of ways that I can bring this into my classroom and I’m excited at the possibilities the provides for students to solve problems that are of critical immediacy! What are you all doing? Please share your ideas on the TeachingOpenSource community mailing list.

Advertisement