The BSCW considered by our group can be used from a public server or installed on a private server under a free-pay license for educational purpose which supports until 1,000 users, and is available on http://bscw.fit.fraunhofer.de. BSCW is a useful tool to manage collaborative work as it is easy to use, efficient and stable and it supports the reuse of documents and their different versions and the establishment of different levels of access permissions for teachers and students to share documents. Besides, it supports the creation of forums and discussion spaces (essential for collaborative work), helps organize materials and information in repositories, enables effective communication means for their users, fosters decision-making, etc. In short, it allows us to integrate several tools under a platform in order to foster the creation of products in a collaborative way. The main features of this platform are:
- Access by means of login and password mechanisms.
- Different levels of access permissions.
- Discussion forums with chronological monitoring of interventions
- Facilities for searching on the Web and on the shared repositories in the tool.
- Conversion among different formats of documents.
- Management of versions of documents.
- Multilingual facilities to customize the interfaces.
- Event services within a robotic system.
Some of the major benefits due to the use of the BSCW platform are:
- Its use is simple, efficient and stable.
- It is an open source software which have been developed under free-pay license for educational purpose.
- It supports the reuse of materials, structures and contents.
- It manages different levels of access permissions to share documents.
- It supports to create forums and discussion spaces for debating.
- It supports to create repositories of materials.
- It supports easy management of people, groups and courses (with different roles) It helps to organize the material and information of a course.
- It supports the generation of specific products in collaborative way.
- It facilitates student assessment and evaluation process.
- It supports asynchronous tutoring processes.
- It provides their users with effective communication means.
- It helps foster decision-making.
- It integrates several tools under an unique platform.
A more detailed description of the features of the BSCW platform considered and the benefits that such tool provides us can be found in (Forosobre BSCW de RedIRIS. [Available on:http://www.rediris.es/list/info/bscw-es.html] [Last access: 27th July 2011], 2011; OrbiTeam SoftwareGmbH and Co. KG. [Available on: http://www.bscw.de/unternehmen.html] [Last access: 27th July2011], n.d.; Proyecto ITCOLE–Synergeia-BSCW. [Available on: http://bscl.fit.fraunhofer.de/] [Lastaccess: 27th July 2011], n.d.).
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