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The Free Technology Academy (FTA) was initially developed by the Free Knowledge Institute and others as an online, full master level programme, with course modules about Free Technologies. As of 2017, that master programme and its related credits are not available anymore, but FTA is still active, albeit with a different focus and model.

Today, FTA offers a set of single online courses on the same topics, in the following manner:

Online or not: all FTA courses happen entirely online, and are specifically designed to guarantee maximum time flexibility. It may be possible to hire single FTA tutors for "in-presence" courses, however.

Recognition: Some institutions may still give credits for certain courses, but we have no updated list of them yet.

Online campus accounts:  accounts at campus.ftacademy.org are now created only for people who enrol in at least one course, when that course starts.

Schedule: in general, we can now start course sessions about once a month, unless tutors are temporarily unavailable. However, we only do it on demand, that is when there are enough requests to participate (see next point). To actually enrol for some session, just contact us.

Groups or single learners: in our model, for each session of each course, the ideal number of participants is 1/12. Maximum number is 20. It is also possible, however, to ask for a single learner session. The big advantage of such sessions is that they can be greatly customized to fit the actual schedules, needs and interests of the participant. The non-negligible disadvantage of the same sessions is the lack of continuous interaction, and motivation, with fellow learners. You're welcome to contact us, to discuss if a single learner session may or may not be for you!

Course content, level and approach:  what is listed as the program, or in the textbook of some course is only a guideline. While the general arguments are constant we tend to "challenge" the participants, raising and/or adapting the bar according to their skills, so that they DO learn more. If a course includes "web server" as a topic, for example, all its sessions will cover web servers. But the explanations and exercises proposed to real beginners will NOT be the same we'd present to somebody who's already had some experience with those servers.

Cost: as of Autumn 2017, the cost of each session of each course is 250 Euro/per person. This fee is the same for single-learnercourses and for group courses. The reason for this cost is that textbooks are available for free (see below), but tutors time is limited, and that is the real value you get from FTA these days: experts who do all they can to help you learn what you need. In a way, our model is the opposite of MOOCs.

Materials: all course materials developed by FTA are Open Educational Resources (OER). This means that everybody can legally download them free of charge, for study or reuse. To do that, follow the links from the main courses page.