The Swiss Virtual Campus project ”Virtual Nanoscience Laboratory ” realises a virtual laboratory for the booming field of Nanoscience. Nanoscience laboratories are expensive and only major companies and organizations sponsored by research programmes can afford their usage. With a concept of distance education, complex and sensible experimental equipment can be shared through the Internet. Three main topics are realized in the framework of a virtual laboratory: user management, communication and co-operation, and the control of virtual experiments. The basic architecture is based on a multitiered client-server model. Each nanoscience experiment is implemented as a stand-alone web-service. 1

. MEDIT is a research project that deals with the development of a Web-based environment for various pedagogical issues. Its primary scope is to offer complementary support to all actors involved, and not substitute traditional practices. Our approach distinguishes a set of virtual workspaces and provides the appropriate services for each of them. In addition to a generic hypermedia authoring system, we have implemented advanced tools for multiple view representation of a course, creation and maintenance of customised courses, argumentative discourse and group decision making, the aim being to stimulate information exchange, interaction, and collaborative work among the actors involved. The project is currently under evaluation through two undergraduate courses in the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. Keywords: computer-aided tutoring and learning, World-Wide Web, distributed and collaborative learning environments, hypermedia authoring system, discourse and group decis...

Nanoscience is a booming field with manifold applications. Nanoscience equipment (e.g., microscopes) are however expensive and only major companies and organizations sponsored by research programs can afford on-site installation. Based on the Internet as a global communication platform, distance education and remote usage might offer a working environment by which complex and sensitive instruments can be shared. The Swiss Virtual Campus (SVC) project nano-world has exactly the following goal: establish a Virtual Nanoscience Laboratory to be shared and used by a distributed user community. Three main topics need to be realized in the framework of a virtual laboratory: user management, communication and co-operation, and the control of virtual experiments. The basic architecture of the prototype is a multi-tiered client–server model which supports individual nanoscience experiments to be implemented as a stand-alone web-service.

The use of virtual educational research laboratories is necessitated for the following reasons: • The classical laboratories are equipped with expensive apparatuses and require highly skilled research teams, and that leads to their restricted use in

Aujourd’hui, les environnements hypermédias sont de plus en plus utilisés pour développer rapidement des systèmes interactifs, en particulier dans le domaine de l'éducation. Compte-tenu du manque de retours d’expériences il est encore nécessaire de mener des réflexions sur la structuration de l’architecture informatique des plate-formes de télé-enseignement afin d’obtenir une meilleure interopérabilité et gestion des connaissances à transmettre. Nous avons réalisé une telle étude lors de la conception et la réalisation d'un nouvel environnement pour la gestion de formations en ligne avec le désir d'obtenir une structure pédagogique réfléchie. Nous proposons ainsi un découpage horizontal de ces environnements en 3 niveaux interdépendants. Cet article explicite le rôle de chacune des couches de ce découpage: niveaux Support, Structure et Sémantique en décrivant, à chaque fois, les causes et les intérêts de cette modélisation. Nous montrons également comment les fonctionnalités d’un système de télé-formation aujourd’hui utilisé à l’INSA de Lyon s’intègre dans cette structuration. Today, hypermedia environments are more and more used to implement quickly interactive systems especially in the domain of education. Considering the lack of experimental results, it is still necessary to carry on studies on the structuration of LMS architectures in order to obtain more interoperability and an easier management of the knowledge. We have realised a such study during the conception and the realisation of a novel environment for the management of on-line training. We proposed to divide these systems in 3 independent layers. This paper explains the function of each one of these layers:Support level, Structure level, and semantic level describing each time the causes and the interests of this model. We also show how the functionalities of an existing e-learning system used today at the INSA of Lyon, fit into this structuration.