Facebook launches Open Academy, teams with 22 colleges

Universities to set up classes and give student academic credit for developing open source projects

After four years of college, there is one piece of advice that I can give every single student, no matter what their major: go out and get some real world experience in whatever you want to do. No matter how much you think you can learn by sitting in a classroom, it pales in comparison to actually experiencing it. 

Luckily, some schools do give credit for internships and the like. But I'm not sure that that is the case for students interested in software engineering. 

Facebook is ready to change that, though, announcing on Wednesday that it is officially launching a new program to help these students to get college credit for developing open sourced projects.

Facebook's Open Academy, a program the social network began piloting two years ago at Stanford, is designed to provide a "practical, applied software engineering experience as part of a university student’s CS education," the company said. 

Each student  is paired with a mentor and a project to work on. To begin the program, all of the faculty, students and mentors that are participating will get together for a three-day event, in which the students will meet their mentors, and learn which open sourced project they will be working on. 

After that, the students go back to their schools and work with their teams remotely. They will have access to their mentors, and will have regular meetings with faculty members at their school.

For the winter 2014 session will begin in February. Upon completion of the course, the students will be given academic credit.

Facebook Open Academy began in 2012 as a partnership with Jay Borenstein, a computer science professor at Stanford. It expanded the pilot program in 2013 to include MIT, University of Texas at Austin, Cornell Univeristy, University of Toronto, Waterloo University, University of Singapore, University of Tokyo, Imperial College of London, Jagiellonian University, University of Helsinki, and Tampere University of Technology. 

Now, along with the official launch, Open Academy is getting a bunch of new universities as well. Students at University of Pennsylvania, UC San Diego, Columbia University, Carnegie Mellon University, UC Berkeley , Purdue, University of Warsaw, UIUC, UCLA, and University of Washington will all be able to get credit for developing open sourced projects. 

This brings the total number of schools participating in the program to 22. 

So why is open source so important?

"Open source is a huge part of Facebook engineering," Facebook wrote in a blog post."We also believe that contributing to open source projects is one of the best ways a student can prepare for a job in the industry."

And software developement is not the same thing as computer science "as an academic subject."

"Projects are often larger than the people who participate in them; project management and interpersonal relationships can have as much impact on software design as technical issues; and systems are ultimately evaluated by user satisfaction rather than technical merit."

By giving these students the chance to get some real world experience, they are obviously giving them a good lesson in what their jobs will be like when they eventually leave school. And, for Facebook, they get a chance to see some of the best and brightest software engineers, who they could potentially recruit right out of school.

Students that have already taken part in the program have worked on open source projects that include Freeseer, Kotlin, MongoDB, Mozilla Open Badge, Phabricator, Pouch DB, Socket IO, Review Board, and Ruby on Rails.

(Image source: https://www.facebook.com)