THE VCCSSE SYSTEM – A MULTILANGUAGE COLLABORATION LEARNING ENVIRONMENT BASED ON WEB RESOURCES

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In the frame of the three years Socrates Comenius 2.1 European Project VccSSe - Virtual Community Collaborating Space for Science Education (http://vccsse.ssai.valahia.ro, project nr. 128989-CP-1-2006-1-RO-COMENIUS-C21) a web system was developed. This system represents a set of hardware and software components which assures the necessary support for all the activities proposed to be undertaken during the whole life of the project. Started in October 2006, this project has the main objective to adapt, develop, test, implement and disseminate training modules, teaching methodologies and pedagogical strategies based on the use of virtual instrumentation and to promote the cooperation between different European teaching and educational institutions to produce and disseminate training materials that will assure the technical and pedagogical elements with the view of implementing in the classroom of the virtual applications through Information and Communication Technology tools. Having in view the project objective, a multilanguage cooperative learning environment based on web was developed. This web system integrates three major components: the project web-site, the e-learning platform and the groupware platform. The web site is developed using the Perl programming language. At the same time, a set of controllers was created for the communication with the other two major components: the e-learning platform and groupware platform, both of them being developed using the php programming language. The set offers the access to the databases (one for each main component) on a MySql Server and to the file repository stored in the system files of the operating system (Bizoi et all. 2008). Before starting the third year of the project, on the 1st of October 2008, the following instruments were developed as applications of the VccSSe web system: e-Space Browser, e-space uploader, on-line tool for web page translation, on-line tool to update the English content on the web page, project member register application, specific forms for assessment tools, products matrix, products matrix updater. Particularly, the web system is focusing on: the architecture of the web system, the hardware configuration, required software tools and libraries, strategies and methods for building the VccSSe web site, software applications used as components in the web system, developed software as components in the web system and security aspects of the system.