In this section, we present our experiences with the use of the system Basic Support for Cooperative Work (BSCW) (Web oficial de BSCW. [Available on: http://bscw.fit.fraunhofer.de/][Last access: 27th July 2011], n.d.) for the management of collaborative work at the course “Herramientas Informáticas en Ciencias Experimentales". This is an optional course in the syllabus of the veterinary science degree at the University of Zaragoza. During the last years, the course has received one hundred students per year on average despite its optional choice nature for students. Due to this fact, around one thousand digital documents per course on average are generated as a consequence of the activities that students have to perform individually and cooperatively. This number of documents requires from academics a great effort in order to assess them and provide students with proper feedback. After generating the documents and receiving the feedback, students must do corrections and modify them accordingly to the notes provided by the academics. Thus, the document versioning control, as well as the cooperation with other students (document sharing) is a key aspect.
From our experience, we consider BSCW provides great benefits in the management of these activities, because of its functionality, its easiness of use, its efficiency, its robustness, and its fault tolerance capabilities. Thus, it supports document re-use, document versioning, document access control (with different roles of users such as academics and students and with different levels of sharing). Moreover, BSCW also supports the creation of discussion boards (essential for collaborative work), helps users organize materials and information (by means of repositories), fosters effective communication among users, promotes decision taking, etc. In summary, BSCW assists in the generation of documents in a collaborative way by integrating different functionalities within the same platform (Alejandre-Marco & Allueva-Pinilla, 2007; Alejandre-Marco et al., 2008).
In our case, the installation of the software required to implement this experience was done in Grupo3w server (http://grupo3w.unizar.es/bscw/) of the Innovation in Higher Education group of our university in the course 2006-2007. The administration of such software has also been performed by the staff of that group so far.
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