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Free Technology Academy: a European initiative for distance education about Free Software and Open Standards∗ David Megías Wouter Tebbens Estudis d’Informàtica, Free Knowledge Institute Multimèdia i Telecomunicació Wibautstraat 150 Universitat Oberta de 1091 GR Amsterdam, The Catalunya Netherlands Rambla del Poblenou 156 [email protected] 08018 Barcelona, Spain [email protected] Lex Bijlsma Francesc Santanach School of Computer Science Tecnologia Educativa Open Universiteit Nederland Universitat Oberta de Valkenburgerweg 177 Catalunya 6419 AT Heerlen, The Av. Tibidabo 45-47 Netherlands 08035 Barcelona, Spain [email protected] [email protected] ABSTRACT Keywords More and more people and organisations embrace Free Soft- Virtual Campus, Free Software, Open Standards, Distance ware (FS) and Open Standards (OS). However a lack of Education, Open Educational Resources knowledge holds back their massive adoption. The Free Technology Academy will address this by setting up a virtual 1. INTRODUCTION campus offering course modules on these topics to become a showcase of a virtual campus based on FS, OS and the use Software has become a strategic societal resource in the of Open Educational Resources. This distance learning pro- last few decades. The emergence of Free Software (FS) and gramme will enable IT professionals, students, teachers and Open Standards (OS) is drastically changing the economics decision makers to upgrade knowledge and acquire relevant of software development and usage. skills on free technologies. The FTA is realised by an inter- In contrast to most proprietary software, Free Software national consortium and welcomes other interested parties [15] {also known as \Libre Software" or \Open Source Soft- to join the network. ware" [20]{, allows the code to be used freely, which means that it can be used, copied, studied, modified and redis- tributed without restrictions. Free Software offers, thus, the Categories and Subject Descriptors freedom to learn and to teach without engaging in depen- K.3.1 [Computer Uses in Education]: Distance Learn- dencies on any single technology provider. This freedom of ing; K.3.2 [Computers and Information Science Edu- choice is considered a basic condition for an autonomous cation]: Curriculum, Accreditation person in the Information Society. Open Standards [24] are the basis of interoperability. They enable the unencumbered flow of information and knowledge and the freedom of com- General Terms petition as users do not depend any longer on formats and Standardisation, Design, Documentation specifications which are controlled by one company. The expansion of Free Software and Open Standards has ∗Free documentation about the FTA project will be pub- brought together a continually growing global community of lished at http://www.ftacademy.eu. developers, by offering solid quality products which have not gone unnoticed in business, government and academic cir- cles. Big players have brought free software into their busi- ness models, and many more SMEs provide professional ser- Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for vices around Free Software. The European Commission and personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are many national, regional and local governments have started not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies adopting Open Standards and show a preference for FS and bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, to OS to cover their IT needs. republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific Although there is a growing interest in free technologies permission and/or a fee. ITiCSE’09, July 3-8, 2009, Paris, France (which comprise Free Software and Open Standards), still Copyright 2009 ACM X-XXXXX-XX-X/XX/XX ...$5.00. a limited number of IT professionals, teachers and deci- sion makers have sufficient knowledge and expertise in these learning projects. Typically, choosing a platform represents fields. This is particularly problematic since these are crucial a future commitment, as its high installation, configuration actors in promoting and implementing free technologies. and learning costs need to be offset. In order to tackle this problem, a distance learning pro- Nowadays, different Free Software tools are becoming avail- gramme under the name Free Technology Academy (FTA) able for teachers and students as e-learning facilities. Blogs, is being developed by a European consortium. This distance wikis, personal portfolios, audio and video tools, among oth- learning programme will consist of specific modules to en- ers, can be used as efficient knowledge acquisition tools. able IT professionals, students, teachers and decision makers However, when it comes to selecting any of them, insti- to upgrade knowledge and acquire relevant skills and com- tutions do not only consider the installation and training petences on free technologies. Students interested in getting needed for their use, but some developments are required to a master degree will be able to complete their study and get integrate these e-learning tools into a Learning Management a degree at one of the universities engaged in the FTA. System (LMS). Therefore, choosing an e-learning platform The FTA's main goals are twofold. First, to set up a will determine the roadmap to the development of an insti- virtual campus offering course modules on Free Software and tution to a large extent, and will often compel to maintain Open Standards with teaching staff from the participating a clear direction with regard to the tools and resources to institutions; and second, to become a showcase of a virtual be used. The type of questions raised by the choice of a campus based on FS, OS and the use of Open Educational platform has evolved in parallel with the evolution of the Resources, in order to promote its use in other institutions. e-learning sector. As a reaction to this situation, an evolu- To this end a virtual campus will be created where open tion from e-learning products towards e-learning frameworks educational materials will be made available and users will has been taking place in the recent years. The majority of be able to follow specific modules. Educational materials in products do not only offer a certain feature, but allow their the FTA will be released under free licences in line with the extension by the addition of new tools, reprogramming or philosophy of the free knowledge and the Open Educational adapting parts, or accessing a programming API. For exam- Resources movement. The educational content necessary to ple, Moodle [3] offers a complete API for programming new complete the curriculum will be developed using the SELF activities or changing certain behaviour. Platform [21], a tool for the collaborative development of ed- A framework offers a set of APIs, which are mechanisms ucational materials. These materials will comply with dom- to incorporate plug-ins, and other elements which enhance inant Open Standards such as SCORM, thus enabling the both the extensibility and personalisation of the platform. seamless exchange with other educational platforms. Frameworks can solve the problems about integration with The FTA is organised by the FTA Consortium led by third party tools. But with this approach, the loose coupling the Free Knowledge Institute [1] in collaboration with the degree [11, 12] is not enough to facilitate a correct interop- Universitat Oberta de Catalunya [8], the Open University erability between systems and tools. In fact, a framework Netherlands [5] and the Instituto Superior de Ciencies do does not allow to break certain dependencies, such as the Trebalho e da Empresa in Portugal [2]. programming language which must be used or the usage of In addition, organisations outside the consortium are in- specific code libraries, programming and design rules. As vited to participate in the FTA and possibly join the inter- an example, let us assume an e-learning framework plat- national partner network. Reasons for joining can be, for form in Java. The integration solution should be Java pro- example, to obtain learning experience in setting up a cam- grammes and follow the guidelines set by the platform. Us- pus project in general and the University Campus frame- ing frameworks, the achievement of interoperability often work in particular, to participate in the co-development of requires time and in-depth knowledge. course materials or exploit them for other courses, to trans- The University Campus Project (UC) [9] is a solution de- late courses and/or localise them for different contexts, or to signed for virtual learning which provides the common func- contribute existing courses which can be offered as distance tions of an LMS, but which also offers a mechanism of in- learning in an international scale. teroperability such that external tools can be executed and The start up of the FTA will take two years. In the first integrated into the Moodle and Sakai [7] platforms (through year, the focus will be on: 1) building up the virtual cam- OKI), bringing added value to the functionality offered by pus; 2) selecting, adapting and translating the initial course such platforms. OKI [4] is a commitment to providing e- modules; 3) developing examination and certification mate- learning services with a standard interoperability layer which rials; and 4) selecting and preparing teaching staff. In the allows connections to many tools and systems like LMS, second year, a pilot will be run with a selected group of users Content Management Systems (CMS), academic manage- and promotional activities will be developed (such as infor- ment databases, repositories and others. mative lectures and a communication campaign) in order to The UC project began under the assumption that the attract a sufficient number of students for the third year. next step to achieve a real interoperability between plat- This paper is organised as follows. In Section 2 the cam- forms would rely on adopting a service oriented model.

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