For the spring 2017 semester, Saman Amarasinghe, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT, offered a new class titled ‘Open-Source Entrepreneurship’. The class strayed from a traditional format, instead of following a recently popular, more project focused style that allows students more freedom in determining the direction of their work.
Amarasinghe’s class was even more unique in that students didn’t just create a complete program by the end of the term, instead, they worked to launch their software, studying user feedback, developing marketing and promotional material, and producing a usable final product.
According to Amarasinghe, the inspiration for the course came from a variety of sources including student comments regarding the lack of time an MIT course load gives them for working on outside projects or ideas for programs and his own observations that many applications built in classes are rarely used or given exposure outside of the classroom.
Another inspiration is Facebook’s Open Academy which unites ambitious coders with existing open-source projects. The professor found that many of his students got bored with or dropped out of the projects because they were not as challenging or up to MIT standards.
Thus ‘Open-Source Entrepreneurship’ which allows students to work on existing open-source programs, saving time in code building completely from scratch, and gives students the opportunity to experience what it takes to successfully launch their own programs for public consumption.
The course was structured around lectures and open work time when students were free to work on their projects as needed. Amarasinghe shared lecturing duties with the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship’s entrepreneur-in-residence, Nick Meyer, who focused mainly on the marketing and audience research aspects.
Students proposed their own projects, as well as working on some suggested by Amarasinghe, and worked with mentors to help give the scope and aid of their project in their direction. Additionally, the budding entrepreneurs had to interview potential users, to gather intelligence on user needs, then create development timelines and promotional plans.
The resulting programs from the courses maiden semester range across a number of interests for their target audience, MIT students and researchers, from applications that make judging hackathons more objective and fair, to flashcard programs that use psychological data to flip through digital cards at intervals maximized to aid memory and learning. Other projects include interfaces for dealing with tensors or neural network models.
Overall, the course gives students an opportunity to practice the skills it takes to successfully launch a platform in line with other successful open-source software like WordPress, Firefox, and Linux. “They got to think of the big picture issues,” Amarasinghe adds. “How to build a community, how to attract other programmers, and what sort of licensing should be used.” He believes the skills taught in the course put MIT students on the leading edge of software entrepreneurship.
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