An infrastructure to support the development of collaborative project-based learning environments

The area of CSCL is short of toolkits to support the construction of educational environments, since the developer of applications knows neither the education domain, nor the collaborative strategies applied to the teaching-learning process. The teacher needs a flexible environment supported by computing technology, and where he can configure different collaborative projects. The authors present a conceptual and computational infrastructure for the domain of collaborative learning based on development of projects, whose first stage was the definition of a collaboration model in the format of conceptual patterns. The requirements and the conceptual patterns gave support for the development of this infrastructure, composed by a collaborative environment, a tool framework, a database of projects, and a library of references