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Provider of open source solutions, Red Hat, expanded its outreach to introduce open source into the computer science curriculum at leading colleges and universities. The company is a member of Teaching Open Source (News - Alert) community and acts as its catalyst. It sponsors Professors’ Open Source Summer Experience (POSSE) workshops.

Thanks to these initiatives, the company worked with professors across the globe to teach them how to launch and incorporate open source into higher education coursework and degree programs. Company officials said that the need for graduates with open source software experience is also expected to increase as the use of open source continues to expand globally.

“We're continuing to add value to the higher education system and helping prepare professors and universities to develop coursework that will produce graduates with the skill sets necessary to compete in today's challenging and demanding work environments,” said Jim Whitehurst (News - Alert), president and CEO at Red Hat, in a press release.

Launched in July 2009 at Red Hat’s (News - Alert) global headquarters with five professors in attendance from the United States and Canada, POSSE is a week-long workshop for professors from any discipline interested in getting their students involved in free and open source software (FOSS) communities as part of their coursework.

Company officials said that the workshops are co-taught by members of the academic and open source communities. The participants learn tools and cultural practices that can be generalized to other projects in the FOSS ecosystem.

Professors attending POSSE are looking to bring open source community participation into their classes within the subsequent school year. Company officials said that to date, nearly 60 professors and administrators have attended POSSE workshops.

Both professors, Chris Tyler and David Humphrey, instructed the first POSSE workshop and have played an integral part in growing the program.

Noting that in the past, students have practised on small academic projects with no real-world impact, Tyler said that by participating in open source communities, students rise to the challenge of working on established projects that have thousands or even millions of users, collaborating with other community members around the world, and having their work reviewed by some of the top technical minds.

“Employers highly value these types of skills and experience, and since open source work is done in public, they are taking note of the students' remarkable accomplishments,” Tyler said.

Recently, Red Hat announced ecosystem support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 from leading Independent Software Vendor (ISV) partners.

Anshu Shrivastava is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of Anshu’s articles, please visit her columnist page.

Edited by Jaclyn Allard