I agree that open-source contribution requires a willingness for self-directed learning. But I don't see how you can draw the conclusion that these students are

I agree that open-source contribution requires a willingness for self-directed learning. But I don't see how you can draw the conclusion that these students are unmotivated. Incidentally, I first learned subversion from a student-run session on contributing to open-source, similar to the one the author ran. I went on to spend hours deciphering and studying an open source project that I was particularly fond of. I've since contributed to several open-source projects, all by teaching myself the codebase and toolchain as required.