Abstract:

The COVID19 pandemic has exponentially increased the use of applications for online training and education.

Most organizations have adopted solutions from prominent international players in the emergency phase, highlighting a solid criticality related to compliance with confidentiality rules, ownership, and access to data by parties outside the organization and lock-in risks. 

The criticality is even more evident if we refer to educational institutions for minors and adolescents.

Moreover, in the educational field, the diffusion of resources linked to social networks has grown considerably in recent years, both as a tool for relationships and communication between teachers and students and between parents and children. The latter is often configured as an "imperfect triangle" in the construction of the relationship between parents, children, and social networks.

At the same time, training activities designed to encourage the development of digital skills and "awareness" on the use of the web have grown, particularly concerning phenomena such as cyberbullying, web baby reputation, or even related to the spread of fake news. 

Is it possible to imagine an ecosystem of integrated, open-source, federated environments that educational organizations can directly manage?
We base the approach on the proposed adoption of environments, applications, and protocols that refer to the fediverse: open and federated protocols.
Several interconnected layers contribute to creating the ecosystem.

The first layer adopts the classic Moodle as the reference LMS, integrated with Big BlueButton for videoconferencing and the H5P plugin for editing rich media and interactive content.

The second layer refers to file and video storage systems. We have adopted NextCloud for file storage and staff activities and PeerTube for video publishing. Both guarantee full ownership of data and access mediated by the Identity Provider. An exciting feature of videos published on a PeerTube instance is that they can be directly published in H5P to build interactive and tracked videos.

The third layer concerns systems for productivity and production of streaming videos and events. We propose Open Shot Video for post-production and Open Broadcast System for live events.

The last layer concerns the adoption of social environments based on federated protocols for microblogging and instant messaging: Mastodon and Matrix/Synapse/Element.

The entire infrastructure architecture has been implemented for the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia that uses Shibboleth as an Identity provider (IDP) and is being tested for the students of the three-year degree course in Digital Education both as study environments and as the environments used for normal teaching activities.

The benefits of such an ecosystem include:
- Identity Certification;
- Protection of users' data;
- Full ownership of files and content on servers and environments directly managed by the organization;
- Development of digital skills in managing ecosystems for training;
- User-Provider Approach to Services;
- Development of custom plugins and applications tailored to the educational needs of users;
- Reduction of lock-in risks.

The adoption of social network environments directly controlled by the educational organization allows, moreover, to educate users (especially minors) to full digital awareness and increase the value of protecting their personal data.

Keywords:

Fediverse, open social networks, open source technologies.