Over the past few weeks, from late January to the first week of February, I ran the “Making College Curricula Accessible” that @rahulporuri outlined in his post, across five colleges in and around Chennai.
The five sessions
FOSS Club SRM Chennai was the first. Around 70 students. The energy was good, students split into teams, each team picked a course, and they started digitising their curriculum into markdown files. PRs came in steadily. Repo: GitHub - nammahari/srm-workshop · GitHub & Forum : FOSS Club SRM - Updates thread - #20 by Tarun_Akash
FOSS Club Pondicherry University had 100+ participants, but the internet gave out almost immediately. It could have collapsed entirely, but students pulled out their hotspots and kept going. We couldn’t get everyone online, but the ones who did get through made their contributions. That stubbornness was something. Repo: GitHub - nammahari/pondy-university: FOSS Workshop at Pondy University · GitHub & Forum : FOSS Club Pondicherry University - #3 by vishnupiriyan_v
Chennai Institute of Technology (Department session) is my favourite of the lot. ~60 students, every single one active, contributions flowing in, questions coming from all sides. The session had a rhythm that felt really natural. Repo: GitHub - nammahari/cit-hackers · GitHub
The FOSS Club at Sai University Chennai had about 30 students. Small group, very interactive. Almost everyone contributed and got their PR merged. Repo: GitHub - nammahari/saiu-workshop: static site with mkdocs · GitHub & Forum : FOSS Club at Sai University (2025 - 2026) - #7 by B.Vaibhav
FOSS Club Chennai Institute of Technology (full club session) had 120+ students. A good number of contributions across the board. Repo: GitHub - nammahari/cit-workshop: Git Workshop · GitHub
How the sessions ran
Each session followed the same structure. Students were divided into teams, and each team was assigned a course to work on. I started by explaining what FOSS is and why it matters, then introduced the basics of Markdown. After that, it was a walkthrough of forking the repo, editing files in GitHub’s in-browser editor, and raising a PR. Zero local setup required.
One thing that came up in almost every session: merge conflicts. Students would run into them and get confused, which turned into one of the better teaching moments of the day. Explaining merge conflicts in the context of something they’d just done themselves made it stick.
To close each session, I walked students through what happens after a PR gets merged: how the GitHub Actions workflow triggers, how MkDocs builds the site from the markdown files, and how GitHub Pages serves it live. Watching that pipeline explained in front of them, right after they’d made a contribution that went through it, gave it meaning.
What stayed with me
The moment that repeats across all five sessions is students watching their edit go live on the site. That moment of seeing their name in a merged PR, and then refreshing the page and seeing the change actually there, does something. That’s their first real open-source contribution, and it didn’t require setting up a dev environment or understanding a codebase.
Also worth saying clearly: these are our repos. We set them up, and we maintain the scaffolding. The students are contributing their college’s curriculum to a site we built for that purpose. The ownership model matters here. Students aren’t maintaining a project; they’re making their curriculum accessible for the first time, as a contribution to something larger than their college.
Internet issues showed up at almost every venue. Students worked around it with hotspots. That says something about motivation when the task is concrete and the feedback is immediate.
What comes next
The pattern works. If you’re part of a FOSS Club and want to try this at your college, reach out. Happy to help set it up.