Here is the official description & link to the course:
“Open Source COBOL Training – a brand new open source course designed to teach COBOL to beginners and refresh experienced professionals. IBM worked with clients and an institute of higher education to develop an in-depth COBOL Programming with VSCode course that will be available next week on the public domain at no charge to anyone. This curriculum will be made into a self-service video course with hands-on labs and tutorials available via Coursera and other learning platforms next month. The course will be available on IBM’s own training platform free of charge.”
A few other bits to clarify things ( coming from me being Director of the Open Mainframe Project )...
- The coursework itself is being contributed to a new open source project being hosted by Open Mainframe Project ( CC-BY-40 license ).
- We would have liked it to be ready at the time of announcement, but it literally got approved by the Open Mainframe Project TAC as a new project about an hour before the blog post went live ;-). Have no fear, it should be landing next week ( there will be a bit of work to come on translating docx files to markdown, in case anyone wants to help ).
- Right now the course work focused on VS Code as an editor, but the project is very open to contributions that leverage other IDEs ( such as Eclipse Che, Atom, etc )
- Open Mainframe Project is part of the Linux Foundation, with IBM being one of the 30+ sponsoring organizations.
- On the notes I've seen around "hey let's rewrite all that COBOL code in some modern language", I won't add more fuel to that fire ;-). I will however say there is some interesting work in a project hosted by Open Mainframe Project called Zowe ( https://zowe.org ), which basically makes connecting to mainframe apps and data on z/OS much easier ( think REST APIs, CLI interface you can use on your laptop, App framework for creating browser based apps, etc ).
Anyways - hope this helps! Feel free to ping me if you want more details or help getting engaged ( @jmertic on Twitter ).
“Open Source COBOL Training – a brand new open source course designed to teach COBOL to beginners and refresh experienced professionals. IBM worked with clients and an institute of higher education to develop an in-depth COBOL Programming with VSCode course that will be available next week on the public domain at no charge to anyone. This curriculum will be made into a self-service video course with hands-on labs and tutorials available via Coursera and other learning platforms next month. The course will be available on IBM’s own training platform free of charge.”
[1] https://github.com/openmainframeproject
SOURCE: The full IBM press release is here:
[2] https://newsroom.ibm.com/2020-04-09-IBM-and-Open-Mainframe-P...