The Center for African Studies (CASB), University of Basel, is planning to create an academic course to support students from Switzerland, Mali, and Guinea in scientific collaboration. To realize this collaboration, an online environment is needed which should allow the participants to communicate, access course material, and work together on documents. Since this is the first time CASB develops such a course, no such platform is in place. The objective of this paper is, therefore, to find a suitable solution that fulfills these requirements. It needs to be confirmed that the client and the future participants can use and access the platform.

To extract the detailed requirements of the platform, stakeholders from all the three locations had to be interviewed. These requirements were then used in a software evaluation, where different solutions were compared to each other. A pilot environment of the most suitable platform was set up and tested with users from all the three countries. Participants were confronted with exercises that needed to be solved on the platform. The results of the exercises were analyzed. The test users were interviewed with a semi-structured questionnaire. The client was trained to manage the platform, possible future improvements were introduced.

The results of the requirements engineering, and the software evaluation showed that Google is the most suited solution for the client. Not only does it fulfill most of the requirements, but it is also easy to use and maintain. Furthermore, no financial investments are needed to purchase or upkeep the platform. The decentralized structure allows students to easily collaborate on their own without the need of the administrators to have to do a lot of preparation work. The testing confirmed the usability of the platform. Participants from all the three locations were able to complete the exercises. None of the testers deemed the platform to be difficult to use or access. Despite that, some minor difficulties with specific functions have arisen. These were addressed in the training session where the client was also able to learn how the online environment could be used in the context of a semester course. It was suggested to the client to develop a guide for future participants. Also, it was recommended to regularly check for add-ons and extensions that might improve on the shortcomings of the solution, such as the collection of statistics. In the end, the set-up pilot environment, consisting of an admin account, example folders, and example chatrooms, was handed over to the client.