Education/Overview
What is Mozilla Education?
Open source projects help contributors learn incredibly useful skills: how to code, how to collaborate, and how to lead in a global community. Despite this, formal links between higher education and open source projects like Mozilla are rare. College and university students who want to take advantage of the resources and mentorship that come with open source development have had to do so on their own time.
Mozilla Education aims to change this. We want to build systematic links between Mozilla and the world of education. The goal is to provide content, mentorship and community infrastructure that makes it easier for students, professors and universities to contribute to and learn with Mozilla. This wiki serves as a hub to enable these activities.
Mozilla Education is about more than teaching computer programming skills or even Mozilla specific technologies. Mozilla has a social mission to make openness, participation and distributed decision-making more common experiences in Internet life. Bringing web scale collaboration to the classroom is an extension of that mission. We hope that using open source methods to teach will help to drive a new wave of participatory, student-led learning in fields like computer science, design and business.
We can help educational institutions interested in becoming active in our community and having their students work on Mozilla related projects.
See planning documents for more background, and the events page for information about upcoming events.
Mozilla in the classroom
Open source development is a rich, participatory learning experience. Students gain real world experience working on world class software alongside experienced developers while they are still undergraduates. But what actually happens depends on where students, educators and Mozillians decide to go.
Although Mozilla Education is working to develop the courseware and materials necessary for teaching, there is no one way to teach a Mozilla course. There are projects in build and release engineering, unit testing, platform engineering and more. Mozilla presents a large surface area in terms of projects that are needed by the community. Mozilla Education attempts to make the process of integrating open source development into the classroom easier by providing expertise and documentation. But what is important is that students work on projects that excite the community and invite collaboration.
