Ruby on Rails is not often taught at Czech universities. At the Faculty of Science of the University of Ostrava, we started teaching it in the winter semester 2022 as a pilot course. We were pleasantly surprised by the interest of students and the teaching gradually settled into two related courses Ruby on Rails I and II. In spring 2026, we added a course focused on the fundamentals of IT entrepreneurship. How to think about your own idea not only from a technical point of view, but also from the perspective of users, customers and the market.
Our goal is to bring students not only theory, but more importantly, concrete know-how, experience from real projects and the perspective of people who are involved in software development, project management or building companies every day.
Ruby on Rails: from pilot to steady-state teaching
We started teaching Ruby on Rails at the Faculty of Arts at the OU in the summer semester of the academic year 2022/2023. We were pleasantly surprised by the interest of the students at that time, and the initial pilot gradually became a stable part of the collaboration between Railsformers and the Department of Computer Science and Computing.
Today, the courses have a clear continuity: Ruby on Rails I runs in the winter semester and Ruby on Rails II follows in the summer semester. This allows students to work through the technology sequentially – from the basics to designing and solving more complex web applications.
Ruby on Rails is still rather rare in the Czech university environment. It makes all the more sense for us to pass on our experience with the technology that we at Railsformers have been working with for a long time.
Teaching based on practice
We don’t want to divide teaching into theory in lectures on the one hand and exercises on the other. Students are introduced to principles, concepts and architecture, but at the same time they continuously test everything with practical examples.
The classes are taught by practitioners who use Ruby on Rails in their daily work. So students learn not only about the technology itself, but also about how to think about a real project: how to design the structure of an application, respond to changes in the brief, write sustainable code, or think about production operations during development.
What’s valuable for us is that students take the knowledge they’ve gained further – in their own projects, other courses, theses or later on in their jobs. In some cases, the collaboration continues after the semester is over, for example through internships, part-time jobs, thesis supervision or job opportunities.
From idea to startup
In the summer semester of the academic year 2025/2026, we also opened a new course Fundamentals of Entrepreneurship for Computer Scientists – From Idea to Startup for the first time at the Faculty of Arts of the OU. It adds to the technical curriculum a perspective that is increasingly important for future developers, analysts, freelancers and founders of their own projects.
A good idea alone is not enough. In practice, it often determines whether a team can clearly name the problem, understand customer needs, validate market interest, and think about how the project can work financially in the long term.
Students therefore learn to look at their idea not only through the eyes of the engineer, but also through the eyes of the user, the customer and the market. The goal is not to make everyone a startup founder, but to show that even in IT it is important to understand the bigger picture – the value of the product, validation of the idea, finances and common mistakes that can be avoided at the start.
We can already see during the pilot run that this direction makes sense, and we want to continue with it.
Why it makes sense to us
We don’t see teaching at the university as a one-off activity alongside our regular work. In the long term, we want to show students what software development looks like outside of a school assignment – with all the technical, product and team contexts.
Ruby on Rails is also a good example of a technology that may not be talked about as much today as some of the newer frameworks, but still has a strong place in practice. A number of well-known products and services have been built on top of it or have been using it for a long time, including Shopify, GitHub, Airbnb, Twitch, Stripe and Kickstarter. That’s why it makes sense for us to show students how to work with Rails in real applications, not just simple classroom demos.
It puts students in touch with real technologies and projects. We in turn meet motivated people who are eager to learn and push themselves. If this results in an internship, a thesis or a later work collaboration, that’s a nice bonus.
So for us, the 2025/2026 academic year was not just a continuation of teaching Ruby on Rails, but also an extension of the collaboration to include an entrepreneurial dimension. Whether students head into development, analytics, running their own business, or in some other direction, we believe the practical perspective will come in handy.