That's a blanket statement that's completely unfair to us. We are educators but actually own this material outside the university. We also teach a class on how to build things like nScope (microcontroller programming), but we teach from the ground up. We do not feel that providing a completed project to tear apart is an effective way to teach.
(emphasis mine).
Wow..... just wow.
Easily 90+% of what I know about engineering I learned by taking things apart. Looking at the insides of something functional, and poking about is far, FAR more helpful then learning theory, at least for me.
If that's your opinion about good teaching, you're going to loose a LOT of otherwise good students.
Welcome to the standard education system! That's how most teachers think, that's one of the reasons people like me learn 70-90% the time by Active Learning fail at studies. They bore you with tons of boring practices and homework without proper understanding of fundamentals, not stimulating the creativity and personal interests of the student.
I'm a special snowflake too! But guess what, so is everyone! You feel you should have been better taught in the way that you best learn? Fair enough. I'd think though that if you do indeed learn from experience, then your experience would have taught you that different people best learn in different ways. Well, guess what, this one may not be right for you. Since you seem to have figured that out, why not move on.
Or, you could keep digging...
I'm a failed student because of that and having an unmanaged ADHD until recently isn't helping me too, but there's no better option. I just need to recover from this SHIT and build my own learning alternative while struggling to finish my studies, that is a very long path and I need to get incomes to do it (aka a job, something quite difficult in my city for someone with a proper job experience and I lack that).
I wish you luck. I was diagnosed and somewhat managed as a kid, but things went down hill for me. I managed to pull out and get a decent start in college, but was already slipping by the end of my first year. I was incredibly lucky that my transfer application was accepted, because the college I ended up at was just what I needed. I've had my ups and downs since then, but I'd say more ups than downs.
Here is the thing though, a good education changes you in ways you can't understand, because the instrument you are using to understand, your mind, is the thing that is being changed. It's been more than two decades since I graduated and I'm still having epiphanies about what happened in those three years. The educational environment I transferred to was quite conservative in many ways, every freshman had to read The Illiad, and learn about the ancient Greeks and Romans and the rest of the course catalog wasn't exactly fashionable. Everyone, including science majors, had to take a breadth of humanities courses. On the other hand, students were active participants. Some classes had lectures, but every class also relied on collaboration and discussion between students and professors. Every science class had a required lab section that took as much time as the classroom instruction, and every student had to do a year-long, original research project in their chosen major in order to graduate. I learned as much, or more, from my peers, than I did from lectures, or text books. It was one of the hardest and most rewarding things I've ever done.
Not all of my professors were great (for me, at least), but I had enough of them to realize that the work of a great educator is often subtle, and easy to miss. I mean, when someone just gets up and talks for 45 minutes like it is coming off the top of their head, or they come into conference, ask a question or two, take a question or two from students, and then sit back, only saying a few sentences for the rest of the hour -- you don't really think of the years they put into learning the subject, the weeks into developing a syllabus, the hours put into each lecture, how they shaped your mindset heading into the conferences, how they nudged discussion, how they've changed and improved their approach year after year.
So, while I consider it plausible that most of your teachers in K-12 and college have been poor fits for you. I think it is equally likely that you had a few great ones you didn't even notice, and a few more great ones that rubbed you wrong none-the-less.
Whatever the case, you've learned something important, which is that you need to take more responsibility for your own education. That will continue to bring challenges, and rewards, but really, what else are you going to do, what other choice do you have?
I'll suggest though, that as you do that, you save your energy. If you don't think something or someone is going to be right for you, and you aren't willing or able to keep an open mind about it, just move on, rather than spending any more energy on this sort of thing:
I hope your project goes downhill and you stop becoming a teacher, you deserve to fail in a very dramatic way. You and the enormous percentage of bad teachers worldwide deserve to stop castrating minds and getting incomes for useless effort.
It seems unfortunately common tertiary teachers are indept at advanced pedagogy. I know a few good ones with good intentions, but they were totally ignorant about ADHD and how to help me at it. Teaching properly to each student requires lots more effort and resources, that's bad for profits! It easier to sell the latest magic cure (snake oil) to student fail by selling a "cheap" device that helps you at practices, but isn't so cheap and you finally learn nothing with it.
Honestly? How self-centered, petty, and hateful can you get? Do you really have nothing better to do with your time, energy and reputation than spew such hatred at someone you've never met, who has never done anything to you and owes you nothing?
And more broadly, I don't get a lot of these comments. I don't know nscope, I don't know if he's a good guy, a good teacher, or a toy poodle. I do know that a lot of people in a similar position to my own nevertheless seem pretty shameless in telling him what to do with his time and energy. I know, I know, this is the internet, everyone has an opinion, and love to share it (yup, me too), and nscope invited comments. Still, I don't get the entitlement. Try meeting the guy half-way? He's clearly put a lot of time into this. He clearly has put some thought into open sourcing things, and I think its clear that he's open to reconsidering.
Here is my take:
On the one hand, its true worthwhile OpenSource generally takes effort, and its true that effort is a potential distraction given the current priorities driving the project. It's true that OpenSourcing the project without putting in sufficient efort could undermine the primary aims of the project by creating confusion among your intended audience. It's also true that OpenSourcing the project early could limit your options in the future.
I'd counter by saying, that while those statements are true, its worth considering probabilities. How likely is it that OpenSourcing will limit your options in the future? How likely is it that OpenSourcing early and without sustained effort will confuse your intended audience? As for effort and distraction, how much effort and distraction is likely if you just push stuff to github?
One stated fear is that OpenSourcing could limit future options if someone rips off the project and profits from your effort. I'd suggest that the chances of someone trying that are relatively low, because for someone to rip you off, there has to be something worth ripping off, and they need to know about it. I'll assume that you do have something worth ripping off, but probably not significantly more than any of dozens of other OpenSource projects that don't have the audience they (may) deserve. Moreover, that still leaves the second issue, which is that they need to know about it, and the better you are at raising the profile of your project, the harder it will be for anyone else to rip you off, and if they do, the easier it is to get secondary benefit from their efforts.
Next is the concern of confusion among the intended audience that could come from OpenSource. Again, I think this is only an issue if your project actually gets enough attention in the first place. If you get that attention because of a well designed and executed strategy, then I think chances are, people won't be confused. If you get that attention by accident, well, that's still better than the alternative, which is no attention.
Finally, there is the question of what it will take to do a good job with an open source release. I think that you have a lot of choice here, and I would suggest that you start by just doing the bare minimum: Push to github, create a very minimal wiki, create a mailing list or forum for people to congregate. From there, you can do just about nothing until something happens. Once something happens, you can decide how much effort to put in. Keep in mind, that at least at first, "something" may just be a bug report, or fix, or answering a few questions. If you put this foundation in place and nothing happens, no harm done then, you can still "do it right" later, though chances are, you'll end up using the foundation anyway.
So, that's what I think about the potential downsides. The upside is also worth considering.
I suspect that your core audience isn't people for whom open source will be an important deciding factor. However, I think that for some of that audience, open source may still be desirable.
I think though that OpenSource will help you broaden you initial audience to include people, like some in this thread, who are curious and willing to spend some money, but feel uneasy about spending that money on a closed-source product from an unproven company, that may not be around in a year or two. OpenSource will win some of them over, even if they never do anything with the source. It will help win them over, even if they don't buy the product, which is more important than you might think, because...
I think the most important thing to consider though is the relationship between the first group, your core audience, and the second group. I think that people in the second group are going to be important influencers of people in the first group. For example, when a newbie comes to this forum and says, "I want to learn more electronics, what do I need, what kind of scope should I get?", etc, the people in the second group are the people suggesting options and/or providing feedback on options the newbie has already identified.
This is on top of other upsides, like bug-reports, code contributions, etc.
Best of luck!
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