Impact of OSS Courses on Student Self-Efficacy

Reviewed by Greg Wilson / 2023-05-07
Keywords: Computing Education, Open Source

This paper does many things well, and I urge you to read it, but it's also a prime example of the kind of frustrating abtract we complained about last year; the figure below gives a much better idea of what the authors found.

Larissa Salerno, Simone de França Tonhão, Igor Steinmacher, and Christoph Treude. Barriers and self-efficacy: a large-scale study on the impact of OSS courses on student perceptions. 2023. arXiv:2304.14628.

Open source software (OSS) development offers a unique opportunity for students in Software Engineering to experience and participate in large-scale software development, however, the impact of such courses on students' self-efficacy and the challenges faced by students are not well understood. This paper aims to address this gap by analyzing data from multiple instances of OSS development courses at universities in different countries and reporting on how students' self-efficacy changed as a result of taking the course, as well as the barriers and challenges faced by students.