CLASS: A Computer Platform for the Development of Education’s Collaborative Applications Luis A. Guerrero Computer Science Dept. Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile luguerre@ing.puc.cl David A. Fuller Computer Science Dept. Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile dfuller@ing.puc.cl Abstract In spite of the important development that the Web has gone through in the last years, the field of education has not taken fully advantage of this development. Using this technology on the educational process could bring different benefits for all its users. In this paper we propose a computer platform on the Web for the development of education’s collaborative applications. This platform includes access control through passwords, and queries to a database with structured information, semi-structured data and meta-information. We also provide some facilities of collaboration for the applications developed. Finally we propose some applications that can be supported by this platform, and we provide the possibility to built other applications not only on the Web. 1. Introduction The development of the World Wide Web in the last years has been so amazing, that today the meaning of Web and Internet is almost the same, mainly due to the addition of other tools of Internet on the Web’s browsers, like e-mail, ftp, news, etc. This development has become very interesting on the collaborative applica- tions due to the fact that the Web has been successfully introduced in many educatio- nal institutions, organizations, companies and homes. The Web has entered into places where the people live, study and work. In the educational field the Web is useful in the research area, since almost all the required information can be found on the net. However, the basic teaching model follows similar patterns than the traditional models of teaching used since a long time ago. We consider that the educational area has not taken advantages of the Web development, mainly due to the lack of tools that support this work, especially tools that support the collaboration between the users involved in the course. The CLASS project (“Collaborative Lear- ning Applications for Students’ Support”) is a platform for the construction of collaborative tools on the Web that supports the educational process at the university courses. In this paper we describe the CLASS platform, previous work, the applications that CLASS can support and the facilities for the development of collaborative applications. Currently there are a few projects that have similar goals. The Habanero project at NCSA [w2] is a framework for sharing Java objects with colleagues distributed around the Internet. However, it does not provide tools to manage data or facilities to the development of Web applications. BSCW (“Basic Support for Cooperative Work”) [w3] enables collaboration over the Web. BSCW is a 'shared workspace' system which supports documents upload, event notification, group management and little data awareness. However, it does not provide tools to manage data or facilities to the development of applications. Web- CT (“World Wide Web Course Tool”) [Goldberg96] is an easy-to-use environ- ment for creating WWW-based courses that are otherwise beyond the ability of the