Journal of Information Technology Education: Volume 9, 2010 Innovations in Practice Editor: Janice Whatley Study of the Impact of Collaboration among Teachers in a Collaborative Authoring System Yacine Lafifi and Ghassen Touil Computer Science Department, University of Guelma, Guelma, Algeria Laf_yac@yahoo.fr ; touil_ghassen@yahoo.co.uk Executive Summary Several researchers have studied the impact of collaboration between the learners on their cogni- tive levels, but few studies have been carried out on the impact of collaboration between the teachers. The aim of our research is to study the effects on the knowledge levels of learners of collaborative construction of learning objects created by the teachers. More precisely, the objec- tive is to conceive a distance learning environment that takes into account many concepts and strategies. Among the tasks assigned to our research team is to study the effects of collaboration among learners on the one side and among teachers in the other side. In previous work, we have studied the impact of collaborative learning on the cognitive profile of learners. In this work, we focused on the impact of collaboration among teachers on both teachers and learners. The aim of this paper is to present a collaborative authoring system called SAC (which is the French acro- nym of Système Auteur Collaboratif). This is designed to be used in an academic environment. Moreover, it can be used by any academic institution adopting the LMD (Licence-Master- Doctorate) regime. Its principal feature is that it takes into account collaboration among teachers for construction of learning objects. In this case, teachers collaborate to build common products. They discuss and coordinate their efforts to build pedagogical content that reflects all their points of view. Through this system, the teachers can put their courses online in various formats (les- sons, tutorials, presentations, etc.) and students can download lessons, self-assess, and communi- cate with their colleagues. We used a certain number of criteria for making the collaboration task more efficient. These crite- ria are used by a search tool of co-authors, which is a part of SAC system. Among these criteria are the behavioral profile and the expertise area of teachers. The co-author search tool is like a search engine but it is used for searching authors in order to perform collaborative tasks. The use of this system overcomes the difficulties met by teachers in traditional systems. These difficulties are mainly related to the lack of tools, and assistance means facilitating their tasks during the preparation of their learning objects. In fact, this system has many features for the or- ganization of learning objects and the facilitation of the courses preparation. These courses are those of the Licence degree. SAC was implemented and tested by a sample of university students and teach- ers. The aim was to know the attitude of these actors toward the system and the content of the courses that are built col- laboratively. The obtained results showed that the teachers enjoyed using the system. They were very satisfied with the main components of SAC, such Material published as part of this publication, either on-line or in print, is copyrighted by the Informing Science Institute. Permission to make digital or paper copy of part or all of these works for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that the copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage AND that copies 1) bear this notice in full and 2) give the full citation on the first page. It is per- missible to abstract these works so long as credit is given. To copy in all other cases or to republish or to post on a server or to redistribute to lists requires specific permission and payment of a fee. Contact Publisher@InformingScience.org to request redistribution permission.