Virtual collaboration spaces: the EVE community

An Educational Virtual Environment (EVE) is an instance of a Collaborative Virtual Environment (CVE), which focalises in providing collaborative, as well as educational, functionalities, such as synchronous and asynchronous e-learning services. This paper describes such an educational virtual community, which aims to meet the requirements of a virtual collaboration space and furthermore to support e-learning services. In particular, we are developing a Web-based system, which allows users to communicate with the other members of the community through forums, chat, e-mail, to schedule events which take place in the learning environment and to join, and even create, courses, which are held in 3D multi-user worlds where users are represented by avatars. These characteristics offer extended functionalities such as support of application sharing and voice chat, transmission of the educational material as well as transmission of the users´ profiles to the other community members. We describe the model of this community and the functionalities that it provides.