Abstract:

History of the project:
Since year 2001, in Politecnico of Turin, a small team of scientists and teachers is working for sick children and boys. The initial objectives of this team were the development of suitable small learning objects and the implementation of remote connections between schools and sick children or boys in their houses or hospitals.
In 2005 that team took awareness that the new learning objects and technological tools could be useful not only for sick children and boys, but also for all the schools. Therefore, it made the decision to collect the developed resources and techologies for learning in a new portal called “FARE” as “Free Architecture for Remote Education”, available at the address “fare.polito.it”. The main features of that portal are here briefly described.

The archive of learning objects:
First of all FARE is a big archive of learning objects which must be absolutely “free” (according to the definition of “Open Educational Resources” proposed by UNESCO). They may be books or chapters of books, video recording of lectures, MOOC’s (Massive Open On-line Courseware), educational video games, and so on.
Now the majority of learning objects is available only in Italian, but the archive can be easily modified, for example, by adding new learning objects of any type.
An important innovation of FARE is the use of “Invenio”, a free open source repository framework. Invenio was born at CERN in Geneva and now it is supported by a community growing every day. It makes it possible to handle very large archives whose size may be of the order of millions of billions of bytes, as in the projects Zenodo, CERN Open Data and many others.

Technological tools for building new learning objects:
A new learning object (typically, a new lecture or a new book) can be easily built by using segments of learning objects already available on the archive of FARE.

Embedded environment for programming in Python:
FARE contains an interactive environment for programming in Python. It has been designed to teach coding to eight years old children.
Tools for simplifying the production of MOOC’s
By virtue of this line of tools of FARE the research team of Politecnico of Turin has obtained the second prize in the competition called “TalentItaly” promoted by the Italian Ministry of Research and Education.

Tools for remote education:
FARE contains a line of tools for remote education. This line is based on the internationally known platform called “Big Blue Button”. The learning objects available on the archive can be used in order to integrate the transmitted lessons. These lessons can be recorded for future analysis of teachers and students.
Availability of the code
All the source code of the software units of FARE can be found on GitHub at the link "https://github.com/open-education-polito/fare-platform". By virtue of those units any programmer can install a new version of FARE on an available processor in order to provide the services of a remote education to a set of schools. Our dream is to convince first the major of Turin, our city, and then the minister of research and education, to use FARE instead of the well known expensive proprietary software.

Some tests:
FARE has been tested on some primary and secondary schools. As an example, project “next-land” has involved 6 schools, 5 research centers, 10 museums, 500 students, 80 teachers, 20 researchers, 40 tutors, 40 companies.

Keywords:

e-learning, opensource, education, open education resources.