
TAGS, the Tutor and Groups Support Scheme, is an inter-disciplinary, inter-institutional project, which brings together software systems builders, subject-specialists and educational content developers. Collaborative Learning is central to the pedagogical goals of TAGS, and this has lead to the concept of groups being used as a fundamental organising principle. Groups form the basis of (i) privileges and access control, (ii) information dissemination and event awareness, (iii) teamwork involving shared, multi-user educational resources, (iv) online management of group learning, (v) user-centric portal generation, and (vi) replicated servers. The technical implications of this heavy reliance on the group abstraction are described and example resources within the TAGS framework are given to illustrate different applications of its group-based methodology. The examples are taken from live systems, which are in current use as part of accredited degree courses at several Scottish HEIs.