From e-Learning to e-Research: Building Collaborative Virtual Research Environments Using Sakai

摘要

Aiming at providing teachers and students virtual learning environments (VLE), e-Learning systems are today widely adopted in educational systems. These e-Learning systems provide a set of services so that teachers and students can communicate through the Web easily. In this paper, we are going to describe how such an e-Learning system can be adopted to support research activities. Scientists are now facing increasingly complex challenges. To meet these challenges, there is need to support research activities using the latest information technology. Since VLE systems are becoming more and more mature, they are natural candidates for building virtual research environments (VRE) systems to support both researchers and administrators involved in research. In this paper, we will discuss how existing e-Learning systems can be converted to VRE systems to support research. In particular, a Sakai based VRE system will be discussed to present what this e-Learning based VRE system can bring to researchers and their supporting staff and to increase their productivity.