Free Technology Academy: a European initiative for distance education about Free Software and Open Standards∗ David Meg´ıas Estudis d’Inform`atica,Multim`ediai Telecomunicaci´o Universitat Oberta de Catalunya Rambla del Poblenou 156 08018 Barcelona, Spain [email protected] Wouter Tebbens Free Knowledge Institute Wibautstraat 150 1091 GR Amsterdam, The Netherlands [email protected] Lex Bijlsma School of Computer Science Open Universiteit Nederland Valkenburgerweg 177 6419 AT Heerlen, The Netherlands [email protected] Francesc Santanach Tecnologia Educativa Universitat Oberta de Catalunya Av. Tibidabo 45-47 08035 Barcelona, Spain [email protected] Abstract adoption. The Free Technology Academy will address this by setting up a virtual campus offering course More and more people and organisations embrace modules on these topics to become a showcase of a Free Software (FS) and Open Standards (OS). How- virtual campus based on FS, OS and the use of Open ever a lack of knowledge holds back their massive Educational Resources. This distance learning pro- gramme will enable IT professionals, students, teach- ∗Free documentation about the FTA project will be pub- ers and decision makers to upgrade knowledge and lished at http://www.ftacademy.eu. acquire relevant skills on free technologies. The FTA Standards), still a limited number of IT professionals, is realised by an international consortium and wel- teachers and decision makers have sufficient knowl- comes other interested parties to join the network. edge and expertise in these fields. This is particularly problematic since these are crucial actors in promot- ing and implementing free technologies. Keywords: Virtual Campus, Free Software, Open In order to tackle this problem, a distance learn- Standards, Distance Education, Open Educational ing programme under the name Free Technology Resources Academy (FTA) is being developed by a European consortium. This distance learning programme will consist of specific modules to enable IT profession- 1 Introduction als, students, teachers and decision makers to up- grade knowledge and acquire relevant skills and com- Software has become a strategic societal resource in petences on free technologies. Students interested in the last few decades. The emergence of Free Soft- getting a master degree will be able to complete their ware (FS) and Open Standards (OS) is drastically study and get a degree at one of the universities en- changing the economics of software development and gaged in the FTA. usage. The FTA's main goals are twofold. First, to set In contrast to most proprietary software, Free Soft- up a virtual campus offering course modules on Free ware [15] {also known as \Libre Software" or \Open Software and Open Standards with teaching staff Source Software" [20]{, allows the code to be used from the participating institutions; and second, to freely, which means that it can be used, copied, stud- become a showcase of a virtual campus based on FS, ied, modified and redistributed without restrictions. OS and the use of Open Educational Resources, in Free Software offers, thus, the freedom to learn and order to promote its use in other institutions. to teach without engaging in dependencies on any To this end a virtual campus will be created where single technology provider. This freedom of choice is open educational materials will be made available considered a basic condition for an autonomous per- and users will be able to follow specific modules. Ed- son in the Information Society. Open Standards [23] ucational materials in the FTA will be released un- are the basis of interoperability. They enable the un- der free licences in line with the philosophy of the encumbered flow of information and knowledge and free knowledge and the Open Educational Resources the freedom of competition as users do not depend movement. The educational content necessary to any longer on formats and specifications which are complete the curriculum will be developed using the controlled by one company. SELF Platform [24], a tool for the collaborative de- The expansion of Free Software and Open Stan- velopment of educational materials. These materials dards has brought together a continually growing will comply with dominant Open Standards such as global community of developers, by offering solid SCORM, thus enabling the seamless exchange with quality products which have not gone unnoticed in other educational platforms. business, government and academic circles. Big play- The FTA is organised by the FTA Consortium led ers have brought free software into their business by the Free Knowledge Institute [1] in collaboration models, and many more SMEs provide professional with the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya [8], the services around Free Software. The European Com- Open University Netherlands [5] and the Instituto mission and many national, regional and local gov- Superior de Ciencies do Trebalho e da Empresa in ernments have started adopting Open Standards and Portugal [2]. show a preference for FS and OS to cover their IT In addition, organisations outside the consortium needs. are invited to participate in the FTA and possibly Although there is a growing interest in free tech- join the international partner network. Reasons for nologies (which comprise Free Software and Open joining can be, for example, to obtain learning ex- 2 perience in setting up a campus project in general agement System (LMS). Therefore, choosing an e- and the University Campus framework in particular, learning platform will determine the roadmap to the to participate in the co-development of course ma- development of an institution to a large extent, and terials or exploit them for other courses, to translate will often compel to maintain a clear direction with courses and/or localise them for different contexts, or regard to the tools and resources to be used. The to contribute existing courses which can be offered as type of questions raised by the choice of a platform distance learning in an international scale. has evolved in parallel with the evolution of the e- The start up of the FTA will take two years. In learning sector. As a reaction to this situation, an the first year, the focus will be on: 1) building up the evolution from e-learning products towards e-learning virtual campus; 2) selecting, adapting and translat- frameworks has been taking place in the recent years. ing the initial course modules; 3) developing exam- The majority of products do not only offer a certain ination and certification materials; and 4) selecting feature, but allow their extension by the addition of and preparing teaching staff. In the second year, a new tools, reprogramming or adapting parts, or ac- pilot will be run with a selected group of users and cessing a programming API. For example, Moodle [3] promotional activities will be developed (such as in- offers a complete API for programming new activities formative lectures and a communication campaign) or changing certain behaviour. in order to attract a sufficient number of students for A framework offers a set of APIs, which are mech- the third year. anisms to incorporate plug-ins, and other elements This paper is organised as follows. In Section 2 which enhance both the extensibility and personalisa- the campus platform is described. Section 3 presents tion of the platform. Frameworks can solve the prob- de different modules of the FTA and their compe- lems about integration with third party tools. But tences. In Section 4 the certification and recognition with this approach, the loose coupling degree [11, 12] process for the FTA courses are summarised. Section is not enough to facilitate a correct interoperability 5 presents pilot implementation of the FTA. Finally, between systems and tools. In fact, a framework does the most relevant concluding remarks are drawn in not allow to break certain dependencies, such as the Section 6. programming language which must be used or the usage of specific code libraries, programming and de- sign rules. As an example, let us assume an e-learning 2 The University Campus framework platform in Java. The integration solution should be Java programmes and follow the guidelines project set by the platform. Using frameworks, the achieve- ment of interoperability often requires time and in- The choice of platform has taken up significant efforts depth knowledge. in e-learning projects. Typically, choosing a platform The University Campus Project (UC) [9] is a so- represents a future commitment, as its high instal- lution designed for virtual learning which provides lation, configuration and learning costs need to be the common functions of an LMS, but which also offset. offers a mechanism of interoperability such that ex- Nowadays, different Free Software tools are becom- ternal tools can be executed and integrated into ing available for teachers and students as e-learning the Moodle and Sakai [7] platforms (through OKI), facilities. Blogs, wikis, personal portfolios, audio bringing added value to the functionality offered by and video tools, among others, can be used as effi- such platforms. OKI [4] is a commitment to pro- cient knowledge acquisition tools. However, when it viding e-learning services with a standard interoper- comes to selecting any of them, institutions do not ability layer which allows connections to many tools only consider the installation and training needed for and systems like LMS, Content Management Systems their use, but some developments are required to in- (CMS), academic management databases, reposito- tegrate these e-learning tools into a Learning Man- ries and others. 3 OKI gateway is an adapter which translates the re- quests of the base services using the tools into calls to the specific platform's API. To integrate a new plat- form, the corresponding OKI gateway must be used. The final piece to take into account is the OKI Bus. This component is a middle layer responsible for the communication between the tools and the platform.