Designing collaborative environments and their application in learning

Nowadays there is an increase on the research to provide a collaborative environment in several areas such as business, health and education. More concretely, our study is focused on providing collaborative systems, offering both types of scenarios, the synchronous and the asynchronous. This paper aims to bring out the design and implementation of two collaborative systems and theirs application to education. One of them is a synchronous collaborative system to be integrated in existing Web environments. This system is part of the research carried out in the ITCOLE (IST 2000-26249). This previous result brought out some key aspects to build a entire collaborative platform for building any kind of collaborative environment, including those environments to support experimentation. This platform was the core of COLAB which is an application for discovery learning and it is the result of the COLAB project (IST-2000-25035). Both environments offer APIs to allow the development of collaborative tools with both types of collaborative scenarios so as to enrich user collaboration.