Various “open” concepts in Computing, such as open standards, open data, open licenses or system interoperability are becoming more important in the professional lives of software engineers. However, students usually do not receive a systematic education about these concepts; rather they sporadically learn about a subset of these topics. This paper presents the revised version of the Open Computing course in the University of Zagreb, Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing (FER),which teaches a clear set of current topics focused on open data and correlating concepts. The new e-learning course is carried out using the “flipped classroom ”educational method; students construct their knowledge in a set of real-world mini-activities throughout the course, instead of passively learning from the official course resources. In this paper, we discuss our flipped classroom activities, their relation to revised Bloom’s taxonomy of educational objectives, and present the evaluation of the first course instance using this model. Students’ feedback shows they welcome this change in approach, finding the course useful and interesting, and preferring this method to the traditional full lecture setting.

While open data concepts become more important in our society, education about its benefits and technical issues is still behind the practice. Students of STEM disciplines should be introduced to open data during their education. The Open Computing course, completely redesigned in the new Computing curriculum, introduces open data concepts, providing both the basics and advanced topics, from technical to social and legal viewpoints. Among the several educational activities, one was particularly useful for understanding the needs and implications of using open data: a synchronous group activity where students had to choose a societal issue, find and analyze two open datasets that would help gaining insight into this issue, assess interdisciplinarity approaches and stakeholders, and finally propose the added value emerging from the solution. In a short amount of time needed, this activity - which tackled multiple aspects of the problem - brought a clearer insight into the topic, building upon the conventional lectures. Students highly graded such an approach to their education, where they had to construct their knowledge by the group experience. A similar group activity appeared to be useful in the con of open data PhD training and might also be used in other disciplines and domains.