FTA Announcement #9: Expansion of the FTA Associate Network and quick FTA News

Gleducar joins the FTA Associate Network

We are happy to announce the joining of Gleducar into the FTA network. Argentine non-profit organisation Gleducar has been working in the Free/Open Education field for almost ten years. It has built a community with over 500 educators and learners and is one of the most important educational initiatives of Latin America. Gleducar NGO will contribute relevant feedback and review FTA Course materials. It will also participate in the development of future courses about open and free educational tools for teachers.

We plan to expand the FTA in Latin America through the participation of the Gleducar community in our dissemination strategies. As an official associated partner Gleducar members are encouraged to represent and communicate the Free Technology Academy with the objective to grow the network of participants in the community and partners in the project.

More information: /announce/gleducar

P2P Foundation joins the FTA Associate Network

The FTA is proud to announce the incorporation of the Foundation for P2P Alternatives (P2P-F) to its Associate Network. The P2P-F is the organisation behind the most extensive research platform on peer production topics around the world.

The P2P-F will contribute to the FTA in various ways, such as providing Guest Lectures to FTA courses and communicating FTA news through their networks. Feedback is expected on course materials, and advise and help with improving the FTA curriculum. One particular joint project the P2P-F will be working on together with the Free Knowledge Institute is the development of a course on "Peer Production and Commons Theory". This course will be developed following the peer production model and will be open for contributions by peers and other organisations. The resulting course will be hosted by the Free Technology Academy and its partners.

More information: /announce/p2pf

FTA Quick news

The Free Technology Academy keeps moving on and of course we are working on the upcoming year's courses. The FTA 2011 campus activities start in the second week of January 2011. For the first term, the following courses are scheduled:

• The concepts of Free Software and Open Standards
• GNU/Linux Basic
• GNU/Linux Advanced
• Free Software Utilities
• Network Technologies
• Web applications development
• Software development
• Implementation of Free Software and Case Studies

We offer a 10% early bird discount for registrations up to 2 months before the scheduled start of the course. So don't wait any longer and register!

More information and the full 2011 programme: /content/programme-2011

About the Free Technology Academy

A Consortium formed by the Open University of Catalonia (Spain), the Open University of the Netherlands and the University of Agder (Norway) and led by the Free Knowledge Institute (FKI), the FTA has received the support from the EC's Lifelong Learning Programme to set up an international educational programme on Free Software. The courses are taught completely online in a virtual campus based on the Campus Project interoperability framework.

Following the Open Educational Resources movement, all learning materials are freely available through the Internet. The use of Free Software (also referred to as Open Source software or Libre Software) is rapidly expanding in governmental and private organisations. However, still only a limited number of ICT professionals, teachers and decision makers have sufficient knowledge and expertise in these new fields. The Free Technology Academy aims to address this gap by providing high level courses that fit into larger Master Programmes at the participating universities.

• More information:
• Contact information: contact[AT]ftacademy.org
• Digital version: /announce/9