Towards the standardization of collaborative learning systems

Many institutions, both public and private, have been working towards the definition of a common set of standards in order to improve technology-based learning environment interoperability and reusability. The first results are already available, but they are mainly devoted to the provision of learner centered and teacher centered environments, with no consideration of communication or collaboration issues. Collaborative learning standardization hasn't received much attention. Nevertheless, most learning theories highlight collaboration as a key concern, and most learning systems, mainly in Internet environments, include collaborative facilities. Our main objective is to contribute to the collaborative learning standardization process with a proposal for a service architecture to build distributed and interoperable collaborative learning facilities. This contribution is based on the definition of open software interfaces for each subsystem in the architecture.