Students line up for new free software master at open universities

Two of Europe’s open universities, the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya in Spain and Open Universiteit in the Netherlands, are about to start the first courses of what will become a Master programme on free and open source software and open standards, The Free Technology Academy (FTA). The program could prove popular, the number of early registrations shows.

The registration for the first three courses at the FTA opened just last week, and already more students have signed-up than initially hoped for, says Wouter Tebbens of the Free Knowledge Institute, who is helping to get the academy started. “We thought to get about twenty students registered per course. But quite a few more than that have already signed on. Students are joining from all over Europe, from Brazil, from Mozambique and from other countries. We are very happy with the response.”

The FTA will begin on 25 January 2010. The first two courses tutored are ‘the concepts of Free Software and Open Standards’ and ‘The GNU/Linux Operating System’. The programme for the second semester lists ‘Web applications development’, ‘Software development’ and ‘Economical models’.

Courses are in English and the first courses will be taught by teachers from the open universities. “We are of course still looking for other teachers, and many free technology experts have expressed being interested to help.” Continue reading at Open Source Observatory & Repository Europe.