HOME-TEACHERS - A DEFINITE PORTAL FOR PERSONAL AND GROUP LEARNING OPENED TO ALL KNOWLEDGE DOMAINS Romualdo Alves Pereira Júnior 1 , Eduardo Alves do Nascimento 1 Flávio Hideo Mikami 2 , Joshua Emanoel Tenório 3 1 Information Architecture Research Center - CPAI / University of Brasilia - UnB (BRAZIL) 2 Ad Infinitum (BRAZIL) 3 i9 Technologies (BRAZIL) romualdo@infociencias.net, dudsdud@gmail.com, flavio@ad-infinitum.com.br, joshuajet@hotmail.com Abstract Imagine a place to teach and/or learn any subject in any language. This could be at home for both teachers and learners, virtually joined by their common interests in a portal with many state-of-art e- Learning resources in an environment of Rich Internet Applications - RIA. Thus, there is a new pedagogical paradigm: teacher at home and learner at home. Survival depends essentially on the quality of virtual classes and interactivity. This paper introduces a virtual class environment which uses rich resources for the teaching-learning process, including audio and video tools for all participants, administered by a tutor; instantly evaluation of the class in course, providing feedback dashboards of audio/video quality; interactivity between all the participants; editing tools; notebook; presentation tool; media and file sharing; chat room and others. Keywords: e-Learning, Virtual School, RIA. 1 INTRODUCTION In order to assist the growing demand for courses from different areas of knowledge in different languages and with different goals (travel, capacitating programs etc) it was created the Home- Teachers Portal, a distance learning tool, as Turban [1] says, performed with tools and technologies designed to overcome barriers to education in the same location or at the same time. Bunker [2] gives us the history and features of distance learning, endowed with unlimited potential to revolutionize teaching in universities, public and private schools, and professional education. For example, Boisvert [3] says that web-based learning technologies allow busy IT organizations to keep their staff members up to date with the latest innovations in IT. The Home-Teachers Portal was developed using Rich Internet Applications - RIA, with many virtual classroom features as: Messenger with audio/video, slideshow, video playback, whiteboard, file and screen sharing, public or private chat and text editor. The term ”Rich Internet Application” was introduced in a white paper of Macromedia [4] (now merged into Adobe) to express the offering by a system of a rich and engaging experience that improves user satisfaction and increases productivity. RIAs can be deployed across internet browsers and desktops. So a RIA application has many of the characteristics of desktop applications. This paradigm turns the system more user-friendly. Home-Teachers Portal matches people who want to learn to people who want to teach, using the virtual environment of the Adsum Platform as described in the next chapter. Home-Teachers is a project developed by Ad Infinitum, a Brazilian company placed in Brasilia based on 30 years of experience of its owners in development and project management of Information and Communication Technology. Ad Infinitum seeks to contribute to the improvement of corporate communication and education processes by offering innovative solutions according to the state of the art of Information and Communication Technology. It developed and sells the Adsum Platform, an integrated solution for collaboration via web in real time to corporate communication and education. This unique platform which requires trivial infrastructure resources and adds extensive and sophisticated range of features is endowed with modern design, Proceedings of EDULEARN11 Conference. 4-6 July 2011, Barcelona, Spain. ISBN:978-84-615-0441-1 000046