I have been teaching English to students of law, economics and management for two decades after teaching young students in a secondary school. I became a computer geek in the early days of personal computers in the 1970's and started developing teaching software when nobody thought that online teaching would ever get off the ground.

When the avian flu hit France a few years ago, I had already put the documents I used with my students on line, as the second plague of French universities at the time was strikes. Hours of contact teaching were lost so I had taken to contacting my students via e-mails and would ask them to send their written work in the same way, but that was not very easy and the follow-up was such a hassle that I soon started to use Dokeos, the platform which had recently been implemented on the university server. But it was little more than a file manager and did not really suit my purpose. Then we turned to Moodle, which was more elaborate but did not allow users to view several windows on the same screen, so that when my students were expected to read a document, pick up the vocabulary and look it up in a dictionary at the same time, they would waste their time getting back to the window that they needed. What is more, I had difficulties communicating with them and needed to send them by e-mail the addresses of the chatrooms and online interactive whiteboards that I had recently discovered and found very helpful. This is how I decided to develop a learning platform which would make things quicker and easier

Thousands of students have been using the @genda 2.0 in my university for the last four years. I have improved it over the years thanks to my students' useful remarks and the extremely valuable advice of my colleagues from Bordeaux and other universities.

Then I thought that it was a shame to keep such a useful tool for myself and a handful of colleagues, so I decided to open a website and transfer the files and database from the university server to a private server, and  make the software available to teachers from all over the world (hopefully). My dearest wish is that a large number of teachers and students use it, although I may have to find ways to speed up access to the database in future, if the software is successful.

That means that hosting and maintenance may very well get more and more costly, that is why I have decided to ask users for gifts if they are satisfied, and then, if more users register, I may have to become a profesional and charge the users. But I want to keep charges low for I have never had in mind to make money, only to cover the costs.