Department for Software Engineering at Faculty of Organisational Sciences, University of Belgrade officially introduced new course entitled 'Open Source Software'. The students who choose to attend this course will learn about NetBeans Platform  and related open source projects like Neuroph  and JMonkeyEngine. The course starts at February 2013, and it will last for 15 weeks, with 2 classes of lectures and 2 classes of labs every week (60 classes in total). To pass the exam students will have to create new or contribute to some existing open source project. The course will be thought by Zoran Sevarac, who is an Assistant Professor at University of Belgrade, Certified NetBeans Trainer and member of the NetBeans Dream Team.

This course was created as an extension of the many NetBeans Platform training that were given at University of Belgrade in past, and increased interest of students in NetBeans Platform and open source development. That will be unique opportunity for students to participate in software development projects, experience team development, and master development tools during their studies. They will also get nice reference to put in their CV when they start looking for a job. They will also learn about current  software development industry practice,  by looking at complex real-world software like NetBeans. 

We hope that this will give some ideas to other universities around the world, how they can benefit from introducing NetBeans into their teaching programmes and how they can help NetBeans community to grow.

It should also be noted that there is an active NetBeans User Group  at University of Belgrade and at recent student IT event Open IT  about 60 students signed for the incoming 1 day NetBeans trainings. We expect that many of them will also sign for the full officiall course. See the line of students waiting to sign for NetBeans Training on picture below :)

From NUGS @ OpenIT, 2012