Interview: Rom Feria, Project Leader of JEDI Program
Rommel P. Feria is an Assistant Professor
of Computer Science from the University of the Philippines (UP). He is the only
Java Champion in the Philippines and also one of three Apple
Distinguished Educators in the country. He is the project leader of the
Java Education & Development Initiative (JEDI) project.
What is JEDI?
The Java Education & Development
Initiative (JEDI) Project is a partnership of the UP Java Research
& Development Center (UP JRDC) and Sun Microsystems, Inc. with the
aim of providing free and open source Computer Science/IT courseware
for colleges and universities.
How did it start?
The project started to address a common
concern of CS/IT faculty members from Philippine colleges and
universities. Most CS/IT university faculty members are members of the Philippine
Society of IT Educators (PSITE). This group voiced
concerns about not having educational materials that are integrated
into the CS/IT curriculum. Though there are various training programmes sponsored by companies, either the college/university is required to pay for the software and
training materials or the college/university is not provided with the
courseware and are left on their own to figure out how to integrate the
technologies in their curriculum. This led to a lack of materials to use in teaching.
That's how JEDI started. We started with the most basic CS/IT courses, as recommended by
the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). The courseware includes
everything a teacher will need, e.g., teacher's manual, student's
manual and lab exercises, among others. The courseware is provided in
Open Document Format to make it easier for teachers to modify it as
they see fit.
What's the list of courses you make available via the program?
- Introduction to Programming using Java 1 & 2
- Data Structures
- Operating Systems
- Web Application Development
- Mobile Application Development
- Software Engineering
- Introduction to Databases
- Java Security (soon to be released)
- Web Services (soon to be released)
- Object Oriented Analysis and Design (soon to be released)
- Sun SPOT (soon to be released)
- Web Scripting (soon to be released)
- Introduction to Programming Using Java 1 & 2, Object-First approach (soon to be released)
Note: One of the above courses, "Introduction to Programming 1" is now available at edu.netbeans.org!
How are the JEDI courses written? What's the process?
Topics are proposed to Sun Microsystems, primarily to its team of
technical evangelists. Once approved, UP faculty members write them. After
the first draft, it goes back to the Sun technology evangelists for QA
before release.
Can you share some success stories of the program?
The
fact that none other than Dr. James Gosling recognized the project,
along with Scott McNealy, is, in itself, a success story. JEDI's
expansion to other countries, via our partnerships with Java Champions
in Brazil and Indonesia, to name two, makes the project a success for
us too.
What are the plans for the future?
Our plans are
two-fold. First, we hope JEDI gets translated to other languages and to
reach as many students as possible. Being an open source project, we
are hoping that we get more people to help improve the courseware.
Second, we hope that our students, in the Philippines, graduate with the skills needed to be globally competitive.
