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With the help of the Centre for Education and New Technologies and the collaboration of Doctor Alicia Bolaños, in 2001 we began to plan the second year of the project. Both the CENT and Doctor Bolaños (Bolaños and Máñez 2000) used an environment designed for cooperative work, BSCW, in project management and teaching, respectively. BSCW (Basic Support for Cooperative Work) was not designed specifically for use in education but for teamwork in general and that is why some teams of professional translators use it as a place that allows them to exchange information and material. Nevertheless, the importance of cooperative learning techniques in current research into education makes it a very useful tool in teaching. It allows us to introduce user-friendly techniques to increase performance and the participation of all the learners, as well as to generate positive behaviours in the socialisation of the group, whose members learn to share goals and rewards, an attitude which they will probably continue to have in their professional live (on the importance of this for the professional group, see Monzó 2002). Thus, the design is extremely well suited to these activities and saves a lot of time when it comes to preparing the environment for them. For educational centres, this application has an added advantage in that the licence is free, which means that, apart from all its other positive points, it is inexpensive to use in the classroom.

The latest version of BSCW has a very broad range of features including an agenda for each individual and group, an address book and capabilities allowing the user to send and receive email, and to store URL addresses and files in a very simply structured directory of folders. It also offers forums where users can exchange messages about a particular subject matter. What makes this an ideal environment for working in groups, however, is the opportunity it affords to share information about a given topic (which could be an academic subject but also a research or translation project) with certain people who identify themselves every time they log onto the space and who share the same responsibility in the development of the contents. There are also other features that are helpful in this sense, such as the possibility of adding new versions of documents without losing the previous ones, which makes it easier to revise translations within a group and for the teacher to access the versions belonging to different members of the team. Another possibility it offers that must be highlighted is that of controlling all the activities that take place in the environment either by logging in and checking the actions done to each of the documents or folders or by means of a daily or weekly report of the actions carried out within the cyberspace which can be automatically generated and sent to the trainer's mailbox. The fact that the files can be marked or that comments can be added to them is also a big advantage when it comes to correcting exercises.

In general, this space did a good job of simulating a collaborative professional environment in the legal translation classroom. Nonetheless, the fact that I wanted to prevent the students from manipulating certain explanatory texts led me to combine this environment with the previous one. This would enable us to provide a more flexible structure for the material. The introduction to the subject and the work plan (objectives, methodology and contents) programmed for the semester were posted on the website as permanent and fast look-up contents. The website also displayed the tasks students would be asked to do, together with related informative material. After receiving the instructions for the exercises or the translation briefs, students accessed the cooperative environment where the texts were hosted and where they had to leave the results of their work (documentary materials, translations, resources, glossaries, bills and estimates, etc.), ordered systematically.

For these tasks, we combined Aronson and colleagues' (1978) Jigsaw puzzle model with Slavin's (1978) objectives model, which is also used by the TACTICS group in Mexico (Juárez and Waldegg 2003). Both of them adapt case studies for use in teamwork. After splitting the class into teams, each group is given an assignment that is analysed and divided into tasks that are allocated separately to the different members (Aronson's model) or which are performed as a joint effort by all the members working together (Slavin's model). Once the search has been conducted, the information is synthesised in the team so it can be presented to the rest of the class. By the end of the sessions Aronson's model was seen to be more productive for the translation tasks, in which we clearly simulated a professional division of the work. In contrast, when the objective was the acquisition of declarative knowledge, as in the tasks involving knowledge of the legal system, students' confidence in their own capabilities diminished and Slavin's model was more effective. This may be due to the fact that it allows students to be permanently in contact with and have the support of their companions and they are not individually responsible for any of the parts of the project. In any case, BSCW proved to be a very appropriate platform for exchanging information.

With regard to the technological aspects, at first this environment was set up in a server belonging to the Department of Translation and Communication, which meant taking active steps to protect it against malicious attacks by hackers. In fact we had more than our fair share of this kind of problems and so when the University offered us the chance to use an institutional server we jumped at the opportunity. Nevertheless, an increase in the number of bureaucratic barriers (hard disk quotas on the server or its administration and maintenance by third parties) and other problems with some versions of the most common browsers meant that this tool was not the ideal setup.

On the other hand, right from the outset students had difficulties with learning how to use the technology in this environment, which obliged us to organise specific extracurricular courses that did not resolve all the problems. Moreover, the environment was not visually very attractive and this ran against one of our basic premises: to make legal translation classes more appealing through the way materials are presented. As regards following up the students, no reports were made regarding individual users but instead reports were drawn up on folders or files, which meant it was easy to monitor the activities carried out by the group but not the individual exercises. It was also a simple task to track the participation of each individual in the work done by the team (students did the work in groups outside the environment and submitted the results together, so that the work appeared under just one alias) or to monitor the progress made by students throughout the semester.

One way to offset these shortcomings was to monitor the student's progress by means of tutorial sessions, which simulated a meeting between the customer and the translation company. In this way we were able to determine how students were progressing and at the same time how the project was coming along. In these tutorials students were encouraged to talk about the problems they were encountering, the improvements they had achieved and their experiences with the environment in order to obtain a personalised guide that would be reinforced later when information was put together and discussed in the classroom.

With a view to improving communication between students and the teacher, the CENT recommended that we use a tool that was then in an experimental phase but which they wanted to make available to the university community so as to enable them to evaluate its usefulness and applications in teaching. This instrument was an instant messaging (mi.uji.es) tool based on an open code. Many of the students were already familiar with instant messaging so that using it as a means of carrying out long-distance tutorials in real time, on the one hand, was made easier by the existence of students' having prior knowledge of the method but, on the other hand, was handicapped by the fact that they used MSN Messenger and were reluctant to change to another application. This system was especially useful for resolving any doubts students had while they were doing the exercises and translations, but one serious drawback for the teacher was the repetition of questions, which were asked as the doubts arose (sometimes the same question was asked by all the students but at different times). In consequence, the time given over to tutorials became fragmented and multiplied.

Another feature of the face-to-face interaction was the technology training seminars which were entirely devoted to learning about the capabilities of the tools. These sessions were planned as extracurricular activities, outside class time, and students were given a certificate of attendance (which they need when presenting their CVs in the Spanish context) in order to encourage them to participate. By so doing we solved the problems of technological literacy and, by extending the initiative to other subjects given as part of the degree course, we managed to save time for a number of academic subjects, since otherwise each of them would have had to devote time to training in the use of the same tool.

Although combining BSCW with the website and tutorials brought about a notable improvement, there were still deficits that needed solving if we were to fulfil our initial aims. The factors that had to be reinforced so that this hybrid model of teaching would offer advantages over the traditional situation included the following:

Take steps to ensure that tasks were finished on time: owing to the continual presence of material within the virtual environment students tended to leave their work there at any time, even after the time limit set by the study programme, and this hampered its correction.
Make it easier for the teacher to carry out a ongoing assessment of the students' work: even though the BSCW registered the name of the person depositing the material, they found it very practical to upload their classmates' work along with theirs; individual tasks undertaken within the group were not documented because the students did not usually employ this environment to exchange materials amongst themselves; the reports were not easily broken down by users.
Make it easier for students to appreciate their own progress: there was no simple way to make students' ongoing assessment available to them individually; self-evaluating exercises were not well integrated into the environment and had to be developed outside it (the HotPotatoes suit proved useful to do so).
Allow for a distinction to be made between profiles: in BSCW, the different profiles are only applied to the technological possibilities of the environment - no specific changes can be made for users, although it is possible to restrict access to certain folders.
Make it easier to reuse material in forthcoming academic years. Exploiting material becomes difficult if it is not saved in a parallel space on the teacher's hard disk.
Solve the problems encountered when trying to make backup copies of material: to make backup copies they have to be downloaded one by one or stored in compressed files in order to download a whole space, which, in our case, has given us more than a few technological headaches.
Ensure the time the teacher devoted to this matter was spent as profitably as possible.