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, assignment submission, online quizzes and surveys, statistical data collection, assessment, legacy systems, security issues. We have developed a multi-tier architecture which integrates back-end tools and systems with commodity interfaces using recent technologies. Data at back-end database modules transformed into knowledge at front-end through object providers, cache level, high level request brokers, servlets, web server  in various formats; relational data, Java objects, XML documents, XSL parsed JavaScript-HTML pages, encrypted data. We implemented an asynchronous open information access environment.  The resulting comprehensive and usable environment evolved  with the needs, reached a large audience, about 400 users, including on-campus and on-line distance courses. This paper presents a technical architecture  overview and discusses its functionalities gained from our experiences.