"Where will we find the talent?"

The feedback loops are slow for higher education, and institutions are only now beginning to respond to the opportunities of DevOps. How can we accelerate this process?

This fast-paced talk will cover both macro- and micro-scale efforts. Over the summer, 11 faculty from Minnesota teaching colleges worked with industry thought leaders to draft a report, “Digital Curricula: Toward next-generation IT education.” The report (including a survey on current digital workforce) compiled hundreds of learning objectives from leading digital and DevOps practices, for instructors and commercial trainers around the world to use in course development.

This report (free and sponsored by the Advance-IT Center of Excellence in the Minnesota State University System) is being distributed this October to hundreds of computing and IT faculty across the 6th-largest education system in the U.S. and will be presented here for the first time to an industry audience.

As a worked example at the course level, the University of St. Thomas offers a survey course on IT delivery, using a “flipped model” with recorded lectures and experiential labs. An open source, 8-node, software-defined virtual cluster based on open technologies is used to illustrate continuous delivery, infrastructure automation, and Agile concepts for the course’s 12 open source lab sessions, as well as collaborative topics such as product management, work management, and operations. Come hear discussion of the motivations, teaching philosophy, technical practices, and results of this pioneering course.