Technological improvements have enhanced our range of educational experiences with such things as distance-learning. The education systems of today are needed to be supported by new architectures for managing the courses, instructors, students, performance records, for grading  homeworks and exams, for supporting assessment, legacies, and security. We have developed a multi-tier architecture which integrates back-end tools and systems with commodity interfaces using recent technologies. Data at the back-end databases transformed into knowledge at the front-end browser through a hierarchical middle-ware that includes JDBC bridges, (cached) object providers, high level request brokers, servlets and web server using SQL, JDBC, Java, XML, XSL, JavaScript, HTML, encryption technologies. We implemented an asynchronous open information access environment.  The resulting comprehensive and usable environment evolved  with the needs, used in synchronous and asynchronous learning, reached a large audience, 450 users, including on-campus and on-line distance courses. This paper presents a technical architecture  overview and discusses its functionalities gained from our experiences.