The collaborative virtual worlds can be used to achieve different purposes according to the intended use. The design of 3D collaborative virtual environments for learning has been an important research field for several years. However, the research in this specific field has shown that in most of the cases, the environments do not have appropriate technical characteristics. The design of the educational collaborative virtual environments goal is to produce environments that encourage users to achieve effective learning. In this sense, the current study presents a design model for development of 3D Educational Collaborative Virtual Environments. This model is based on the engineering software techniques and methods. It is supported by a spiral cycle that allows us to develop applications. The process is divided into a set of activities that are being carried out throughout each cycle, producing several work products, with the aim to provide each team member a set of guidelines and tools necessary for to make intelligent decisions about what they do. The model is composed by five steps, namely: Conception, Analysis, Design, Implementation and Evaluation. Each step contains a set of diagrams to support the developer team in their tasks. With this model, the applications are developed in a series of incremental releases, that is, the final system is constructed, based on the refined prototype. These steps include activities that enable to quantify the quality of Educational Collaborative Virtual Environments (ECVE). It is based on the Quantitative Evaluation Framework developed by Escudeiro (Escudeiro, 2007) and allow us to have a degree of freedom in the selection of quality criteria. Thus, we can obtain a single quantitative value of quality for any domain in analysis, i.e., we can adapt it in any domain and valence.
