A HYBRID APPROACH TO COMPUTER SCIENCE EDUCATION A Case Study: Software Engineering at Aristotle University

Traditionally one characterization of formal education has been that it is 'closed', resulting in the fact that learning spaces with their educational materials, and individual students' learning processes and outcomes remain unavailable for the general public. The hybrid approach to Software Engineering piloted at Aristotle University during the winter semester 2008 / 2009 on the other hand builds upon the way learning and knowledge creation at the participatory web takes place, in particular within the Free / Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) communities. This is to say that on the hand the learning environment used at this course is open for participation of any individual interested at the subject (inviting in), and on the other hand Aristotle's software engineering students are engaging at students driven small scale learning projects, with each of those learning projects being associated to an open source project (sending out). This combination of 'inviting in' and 'sending out' is what we like to call a hybrid approach. One objective of the hybrid approach is to provide the foundation required for an evolutionary growing learning ecosystem where learning processes and outcomes have the potential to become learning resources for future students and therefore connecting content to discourse.