A plan to revamp current efforts around Firefox OS Education and transition the Firefox OS university course into a more open, more webby format, keeping the mobile focus still, but embracing emerging standards from the last few years around progressive webapps.
After several several early invocations, the 2015 fall semester was the first year in which Mozilla was actively contributing to the success of the program. With support from the Mozilla Reps program, and under the guidance of Brian King the semester launched with the course being implemented at 5 different colleges and universities, coming close to 100 students picking up the course at the start of the semester.
Krisztián Karóczkai, author and teacher of the course was not just building the MOOC course material and teaching it at his home institution, University of Óbuda, but brought his alma mater, College of Dunaújváros into the program as well as with the support of Mozilla taught guest-lectures at the other institutes' classes and presented the program at Hungarian educational conferences.
In the 2015/2016 fall semester from the 96 subscribed student 39 managed to complete the success requirement (building a Firefox OS application), some of those (28) already live in the Firefox Marketplace.
Among the apps are some pretty well-received ones, such as Snakey (full list of submissions). The program was presented at various conferences on education & edutech.
The 2016 Fall semester, instead of focusing on Firefox OS as previous iterations of the program did, will focus on cross-platform mobile development. Earlier editions were, in fact themselves very portable in the baseline webapp development knowledge taught, we are keeping those parts and best practices intact, while replacing most of the FirefoxOS-specific details (packaged apps, marketplace, non-standard APIs) with their nascent, standard and more widely supported technologies (including, but not limited to Web App Manifests, service workers, Push API and Notifications API, etc.)
The current Firefox OS Course material would have needed to be updated soon anyway due to changes in aspects of Firefox OS at 2.5/2.6 (such as the new security architecture), these efforts now can be channeled into deprecating the parts that are no longer useful, and advocating cross-browser, standard solutions.
This doesn't mean ditching Firefox OS in the slightest, au contraire,
as service workers and other Progressive WebApps-related features land
in Gecko, FxOS phones used at previous occasions could be (if updated to
latest versions of Firefox OS, running an up-to-date Gecko) could still
be used to develop and test apps with the new curriculum.
On top on that, though, students can create and test their applications
using their own personal devices, using either Firefox (for Android/iOS)
or the built-in browser. This would bring the acquired knowledge closer
to the real-world usecases, which, in turn would increase the appeal
towards the course, on both universities' & students' sides.