Facebook’s Open Academy Pairs Students With Open Source For University Credit

[ReadWrite]

   

Facebook is publicly expanding its Open Academy program that partners university computer science students with open source projects for college credit. Initially piloted at Stanford University in 2012, the program will open up to a total of 22 universities around the world for the 2014 winter session.  

Open Academy provides hands-on software engineering experience and works with university faculty to launch courses that pair CS students with active open source products and mentors. At the beginning of each semester, students and mentors spend a weekend at Facebook headquarters hacking on projects, then return to school to work in virtual teams for the remainder of the semester.

See Also: Is Facebook The World's Largest Open Source Company?

 This is just the latest development in Facebook's long and transparent history of promoting open source software. In fact, the company has admitted that it could not exist without it. And Facebook is known as the largest open source company, not just for its technological advances—like the open-sourced data center—but also for the "spirit of openness" it has created.

While the social network is currently the largest open source contributor, it is clearly grooming developers to similarly innovate using open source technology in the future.

Members of Open Academy worked on projects including Ruby on Rails, MongoDB, SocketID, Mozilla OpenBadge, ReviewBoard, Phabricator, PouchDB, Kotlin and Freeser. The winter 2014 course will officially begin in early February.

 

Photo via HackNY on Flickr via CC.

[ReadWrite]