NetBeans at the Open University
The Open University is a distance-learning university. This means that each Open University course is supplied with all materials a student needs to be able to study it from his or her location. I wrote "location", because, though many students study these courses from home, there are several who study during breaks (I hope! ;-)) at work. I know some who studied on the train while commuting to and from work!
The materials provided by the Open University include the books and the software. The standard software package, supplied with all courses, consists of applications used for e-Learning (some examples: web browser, browser plugins, FirstClass conferencing system). There are also course-specific applications, provided only for students studying particular courses, for example, maths or statistics software. Computing courses usually require the use of software development tools.
The major difficulty is posed by the fact that a student has to set up all the tools on her or his computer. Despite access to a helpdesk, this sometimes can be a daunting task.
Java is now a language universally taught to the Computer Science students, and the Open University is no exception. Java is frequently used to illustrate the theoretical principles of computing. The Open University used to supply various versions of JBuilder with the courses involving the use of Java. This was not very satisfactory to some students. The versions provided were usually quite outdated, which was OK for teaching the theoretical principles, but very frustrating to students who wanted to try new techniques (or did not want to use deprecated ways of programming). I found this particularly frustrating while studying a course on the development of the Internet applications. The web programming facility was only available in JBuilder Pro, but only the newer versions of JBuilder Foundation were available as free downloads. As I wrote on NetBeans page, this was the reason which prompted me to download and start using NetBeans.
I am pleased to report that the situation changed in 2007. All but one Open University courses involving Java, use NetBeans! The exception is the introductory course M255 "Object-oriented programming with Java", using BlueJ as its Java environment. I would like to think that, by telling others (on the course and the Open University Students Association forums) about my good experience with NetBeans (emphasising the ease of use and the fact that the basic installation comes packed with features) I made a small contribution towards this decision :-). I must add, I was not the only one.
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