GUNI recognizes Pakistani IT Education Project

Islamabad, 24 June 2009: Global University Network for Innovation (GUNI) recently acknowledged a Pakistani project titled “Integration of Open Source Software Projects in IT Education” as an innovative integration of open source projects in software engineering, and was also mentioned in their newsletter. This project is funded by National ICT R&D Fund, Ministry of IT & Telecom and is executed by a team of researchers at the Software Engineering Research Centre at the National University of Computer and Emerging Sciences (FAST-NU) Lahore, Pakistan.

GUNI is composed of UNESCO Chairs in Higher Education, research centers, universities, networks and other institutions highly committed to innovation in higher education. More than 100 institutions from around the world are GUNI members with the goal to contribute to the reinforcement of higher education by the application of the decisions of the World Conference on Higher Education. GUNI supports several activities such as Higher Education in the World, International Barcelona Conference on Higher Education and Universities and Social Commitment Observatory.

The Software Engineering Research Center (SERC) at the National University of Computer and Emerging Sciences (FAST-NU) has implemented an innovative strategy to enhance the student’s participation and learning in developing open source software. This funded project by National ICT R&D Fund (Ministry of IT & Telecom) worth PKR 37.6 million aims to provide education in Software Engineering by preparing the students for their utilization in the software industry. This could ideally be achieved by involving the students in realistic projects. The project aims for a new method of teaching software engineering to undergraduate students based on open software. SERC has turned to open source software to allow students, in collaboration with companies such as Openbravo ERP and OrangeHRM, getting real hands-on experience on projects used in the industry.

This project is gradually achieving its objectives by training and allowing students to learn good programming practices by reading professionally written high-quality code and by getting feedback from professionals through open source while sequentially helping software industry by providing them with the workforce that has worked on industrial strength projects.

Global University Network for Innovation states in its newsletter: “If successful, this model has the potential to revolutionize the software engineering education by addressing the fundamental issue of exposing the students to real-life projects and help the software industry without adding any extra overhead on the faculty.”

More information about the project is available here and GUNI’s website.