Collaborative Document Authoring as an E-Learning Component

An effective learning management system (LMS) is a vital component of an overall
E-Learning infrastructure in universities nowadays. In the simplest case, Learning
Management System can be seen as a structured repository of courseware materials provided
with additional communication facilities such as discussion forum, annotations, chats, etc. In
the more complex cases, LMS implements different training scenarios where communication
and collaboration plays a very important role. In this paper, we describe a so-called Authoring
Room scenario. The Authoring Room component provides an environment for online
collaborative authoring of textual documents. Since many cloud services allow users to edit
textual documents in collaboration, the scenario is implemented on the base of the cloud
service called Etherpad.
Selection of this service was mainly justified by the university rule that explicitly prohibits
uploading students' assignments onto third-party servers without explicit written permission
from the students. Etherpad is the only cloud service that allows installing the software and
database on a local university server.
Another crucial advantage of Etherpad is existing of modern Application Programming
Interface (API) and absence of an own authentication schema. LMS may use its own
authentication schema and set via the API different permissions for different users. This allows
Etherpad to be seamlessly embedded into an LMS and extend it with real-time functionality.
The detailed collaborative authoring scenario, implementation of this scenario and preliminary
results are described in this paper.