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History

The use of web applications to support learning, teaching and management of student data in an educational institution is interesting because it facilitates teachers performing some teaching and management tasks –for example the dissemination of documents or the query of students data–, and because it fosters student's autonomy and self-learning, who can access such services at any time and from anywhere.

Due to the complexity of implementation of these desired features on the web of the teacher, the department or the center, it is desirable that the educational institution has a common tool for all courses and teachers. Therefore, since the late 90s the use of learning management systems, bringing together the necessary functionalities to support teaching and learning through internet. The most widespread example among privative platforms is Blackboard. As examples of free software platforms we can cite Moodle, Chamilo or Claroline, among others. In general, these systems allow the creation of courses that can be designed and managed as a whole by teachers without a highly technical knowledge. Its main drawbacks are the high cost of licenses (in the case of privative platforms), large computing needs of most of the platforms in institutions with a large volume of courses and users, the dependence on an outside company, and the difficulty of adapting to the needs and particularities of each organization.

Alternatively, some educational institutions developed their own platforms designed for their specific needs –for example, AulaWeb at the Polytechnic University of Madrid–. So SWAD emerged and developed over several years as a specific tool for the University of Granada (UGR).

SWAD began in September 1999 in the Department of Architecture and Computer Technology of the UGR, grew since 2003 until 2008 under three teaching innovation projects, since 2008 until 2016 it has been one of the three tools of PRADO, the platform of resources to support teaching of the UGR, supported by the Virtual Learning Center and since 2016 is offered again to the UGR from the Department of Computer Architecture and Technology. Almost as early as its beginning, SWAD was offered free of charge to the entire UGR to support face-to-face teaching and was very well received by students and professors of the UGR.

Throughout its development it became independent of a specific institution, resulting in a configurable tool for any educational institution. In January 2010 the SWAD source code was released under the GNU Affero General Public License version 3 so that it could be installed at other universities or educational institutions. Today SWAD is not only used in the UGR. In April 2012 it came into use in the OpenSWAD project (openswad.org) as a free cloud platform for any institution.