I missed the meeting and have a few things to add from my side (FOSS Club STIST, Thiruvananthapuram):
Some observations through the looking glass
- The CSE dept, STIST has a vastly different campus culture compared to other colleges. We are not a big college where people compete to get admissions. Most of the students here do not join CSE because they are into tech but because of other reasons (lack of awareness about available options, lack of other options because of low “marks”, pressure from parents, joining for the sake of getting a degree, etc).
- Also, many CSE faculties do not know much outside the syllabus they were taught, like about software development or IDEs or Linux (this post comes to mind). Boring theory classes often make even the curious students disillusioned from the first year. Add to that the outdated syllabus (we were taught C in Turbo C, Win XP in first year) and you get the gist. The systems were upgraded later (Ubuntu 22.04, i3 with 8 GB RAM, SSD) but the conditions of the faculty remains the same. I mentioned this because the FOSS Club staff advisor used to ask me if I know about places for faculty development and training and I see this as an acknowledgement of the problems haunting the dept.
- Very few students here know how to code with functions or classes or even use an IDE, and as far as I can see, the scenario hasn’t improved now. Even though the college encourages club activities and non-classroom learning, support from the CSE department has been very less and is entwined in bureaucracy. Students tend to attend events by FOSS Club and other clubs because they are a break from the routine theory classes, not because of the FOSS or even the tech angle.
Some more observations
- This problem is not unique to the FOSS Club, all the other clubs have a similar issue with participation or student interest
- We haven’t really found a solution to the problems, but I had found that encouraging Linux by showing off screenshots of DEs and themes, instead of events or as club activities has made some of my friends use Linux and like them.
- Using Linux makes them understand the advantages and soon they’d learn the command line and other stuff by themselves
- A few people also came to understand the freedom angle of open source from this and has slowly began to embrace FOSS and become more interested in the philosophy
tl;dr
- the problem: outdated syllabus → boring lectures → disillusioned students
- the solution (kind of): show off linux eye candy → linux installation → embrace FOSS → attend events
Of course this is unique to our college. Other colleges have a different scenario.
