Semester of Code: Piloting virtual placements for informatics across Europe

Abstract

VALS (Virtual Alliances for Learning Society) European Project intends to build knowledge partnerships between European Higher Education Institutions and Business stakeholders across the World to collaborate on resolving authentic business problems through Open Innovation and Open Source Software. To conduct these knowledge partnerships, the VALS project leverages the virtual placements, in which students from all European countries can be involved in the resolution of real business problems, developing by this way professional skills, and other business-related attitudes that will help them to enhance their (future) professional career. These virtual placements result in the Semester of Code, which is a set of practices, methods and processes for creating and managing real virtual placements. Following these ideas, this paper is focused in the description of how is designed this Semester of Code, how the VALS partners have developed different tools, guidelines and processes to manage and track the virtual placements and how are performed this set of tools and guidelines in order to achieve the success in the pilot tests of the Semester of Code and its virtual placements.

Las competencias transversales de los egresados de los másteres universitarios

“…La Universidad hace tiempo que ha incluido esto entre sus principales misiones (García-Peñalvo, 2016), lo cual no significa que esta relación este exenta de problemas, como por ejemplo se extraía de la experiencia del proyecto VALS (Virtual Alliances for a Learning Society) (García-Peñalvo, Cruz-Benito, Conde, & Griffiths, 2015; García-Peñalvo, Cruz-Benito, , aunque también aporta interesantes áreas de oportunidad como la innovación abierta (Chesbrough, 2003;Ramírez-Montoya & García-Peñalvo, 2018).…”

Educational Robotics Summer Camp at IPB

“…This project will provide frameworks and tools to facilitate the learning actions based on robotics to teach STEAM areas [1]. The description of similar projects can be found in [2][3][4][5]. Innovative practices in the digital era by applying challenge based learning approaches to address integrating STEAM will be created.…”

Virtual Placements Management Process Supported by Technology: Proposal and First Results of the Semester of Code

“…Within this context the European Project Virtual Alliances for Learning Society -VALS (40054-LLP-L-2013-1-ES-ERASMUS-EKA) [7] arises, which promotes the establishment of Knowledge Alliances among Higher Education Institutions and the Business world through corporations, foundations and projects, to carry out open innovation processes creating collaboration bridges between the Academia and Business, which allows obtaining feedback from the best of both in pursuit of a common goal of development and innovation based on open philosophies (Open Source [8], Open Innovation [9], Open Knowledge [10][11][12]). The collaboration proposed by this project is implemented through the development of practices in companies and projects worldwide that pose real business problems [13] This article has been accepted for publication in a future issue of this journal, but has not been fully edited. Content may change prior to final publication.…”

“…Citation information: DOI 10.1109/RITA.2016.2518461, IEEE Revista Iberoamericana de Technologias del Aprendizaje > REPLACE THIS LINE WITH YOUR PAPER IDENTIFICATION NUMBER (DOUBLE-CLICK HERE TO EDIT) < 2 students that study computer sciences and other related areas in European educational institutions, in a process regulated by establishing a system of rewards and non-economic compensations which benefits all stakeholders (a win-win approach) [14]. The programme that materializes this collaboration and student placements in companies is called Semester of Code [15] and it is one of the most outstanding tangible results of the project VALS.…”