On the advantages of using web & grid services for the development of collaborative learning management systems

Modern on-line collaborative learning environments no longer depend on homogeneous groups, static content and resources, and single pedagogies, but high customization and flexibility are a must in this context. This means that collaborative learning practices need to be continuously adapted, adjusted, and personalized to each specific target learning group. Moreover, these environments are to enable and scale the involvement of an increasing large number of single/group participants who can geographically be widely distributed, and who need transparently share a huge variety of both software and hardware distributed resources. As a result, collaborative learning applications need to be designed in a way that overcome important nonfunctional requirements arisen in distributed contexts, such as scalability, flexibility, availability, interoperability, and integration of different, heterogeneous, and legacy collaborative learning systems. As a contribution towards this direction, in this paper, an approach based on Web and Grid services is proposed to guide developers in meeting these demanding requirements for the enhancement and improvement of the collaborative learning experience in highly distributed environments.