One of the main shortcomings of programming courses is the lack of practice with real-world systs. As a result, students feel unprepared for industry jobs. In parallel, open source software is accepting contributions even from inexperienced programmers and achieves software that competes both in quality and functionality with industrial systs. This article describes: first, a setting in which students were required to contribute to existing open source software; second, the evaluation of this experience using a motivation measuring technique; and third, an analysis of the efficiency and commitment of students over the time. The study shows that students are at first afraid of failing the assignment, but end up having the impression of a greater achievent. It ses also that students are inclined to keep working on the project to which they contributed after the end of the course.

Formally defining the knowledge units taught in a course helps instructors ensure a sound coverage of topics and provides an objective basis for comparing the content of two courses. The main issue is to list and define the course concepts, down to basic knowledge units. Ontology learning techniques can help partially automate the process by extracting information from existing materials such as slides and textbooks. The TrucStudio course planning tool, discussed in this article, provides such support and relies on Text2Onto to extract concepts from course material. We conducted experiments on two different programming courses to assess the quality of the results.

Curriculum and course planning is a key step in developing quality educational programs, but current practices very often lack a systematic approach. This article addresses this issue by refining and expanding the concept of Testable, Reusable Unit of Cognition (Truc). The methodology allows modeling courses and verifying compliance of a given course to a given description. It also makes it possible to describe precisely what students have previously learned and, as a result, adapt the teaching to their specific needs. The article presents a case study of comparing a subset of two introductory programming textbooks and describes the application TrucStudio that supports the methodology.

Ever growing expectations from students, university management and other stakeholders make course preparation increasingly timeconsuming. Setting up a course from scratch requires producing many supporting documents such as syllabi, schedules, and course web sites listing the concepts being taught. This can be a considerable effort, taking time away from tasks with a more immediate pedagogical value, such as answering student questions and refining the concepts themselves.The TrucStudio course development framework supports a systematic approach to these necessary but arduous tasks. TrucStudio is organized like a modern programming environment, but its elements of discourse, rather than software modules, are units of knowledge such as notions, Trucs and clusters.In addition to course development, applications of TrucStudio include checking sound coverage of topics and comparing courses on an objective basis. This presentation focuses on two novel features of TrucStudio: version management of knowledge units and course information; and generation of output documents in various formats from knowledge units and other material managed by TrucStudio.