A Learning Environment for Synchronous Tutorial Advising

This paper describes the requirements, the design issues and the implementation of LESTA, an infrastructure supporting Collaborative Distance Learning (CDL) activities for synchronous tutorial advising. Based on client-server architecture, LESTA provides abstraction for modelling users as virtual classes of objects (interfaces) whose interaction is eventbased. Users are, in turn, listeners and generators of events distributed by means of software agents. A prototype is presented implementing LESTA on top of a standard Internet protocol and supporting tutorial lab for students enrolled in the first course of Computer Science.