Students and alumni of Fundamentals of Cloud Computing at BU and Northeastern, (now known as CS/ECE 528 and CS 6620) and members of the MOC Community – Please consider proposing projects for the course starting this fall. Mentors are the backbone of the course, and people that have taken the course have turned out to be some of the best mentors!
Once again we are looking for mentors for our cloud computing course, which is being offered at BU this Fall. We would love the proposals as soon as possible, and definitely before the class starts Sept 3rd. If you’ve done this before, the mentor registration form is here: https://forms.gle/8TgG9pNam66g2MNFA. For those of you who haven’t – Fundamentals of Cloud Computing is a senior/graduate-level class that includes a semester-long capstone-like project, with the projects being proposed and supervised by an industry mentor. The projects are completed in teams of 5-7 students, who are expected to spend 5-8 hours per week on the project over the 13-week term, with presentations to the class every two weeks to ensure they don’t slack off until the end of the term. Although some of the students’ time will be spent learning new technologies, in prior years many teams have achieved significant results, ranging from nice-to-have tools to (typically open-source) product enhancements.We are looking for project proposals for this fall, of a size appropriate for a team of 5-7 students. The goals of these projects are to:
- Give students experience in web and/or cloud technologies
- Give them real experience as part of an agile development team
- (hopefully) Develop a useful artifact with real users
Projects are typically (but not always) open source, and students will share significant details of concept and design with instructors and the class as part of the evaluation process.Students will rank their choice of project, and will be assigned to projects based on preference and a skills survey. As a result, you should expect a team which is motivated, has some (hopefully all) of the skills you have requested, and represents a cross-section of class ability. The students will have substantial course-based experience, but often little experience putting that background into practice when addressing an unknown (i.e. non-classroom) problem. As a mentor your goal will be to help translate this academic knowledge, to help them design and build a real artifact to solve a real problem.Mentors are critical to project success. We will need mentors with the technical expertise to help guide the students – you should have the skills (if not the time) that would be needed to complete the project, and be able to answer technical questions the students ask (even if the appropriate response is often to show them where to look for the answer).
The typical time commitment is about 2 hours/week, although often this can be shared between a technical and non-technical mentor. Meeting times are outside of class hours and are negotiated with students, and mentor/student meetings can (and often are) remote via Skype, Zoom, etc.
Questions? Email Orran and cc: Jen.
Join the Fundamentals of Cloud Computing Course Facebook page.
