Cooper

Project: COOPER (Collaborative Open Environment for Project Centered Learning)

Website: www.cooper-project.org

Project description:
COOPER is an EU funded collaborative specific targeted research project from the sixth framework programme of the Information Society Technologies IST (contract No. FP6 IST - 027073) that was officially launched on 1 December 2005. The COOPER project is dedicated to supporting long-distance cooperation of teams of students working on complex projects, assuming that the students and advisors are geographically dispersed and have heterogeneous backgrounds and competencies. COOPER applies to the following learning environments:

• Graduate (or post-graduate) university studies involving students and lecturers participating in focused projects (e.g., masters or specialization courses) coming from different institutions and backgrounds;

• Company universities and company training, involving multi-national participants coming from company’s sites or customers which are world-wide dispersed, participating in the launching of new product or technology, or in product- and project-centred training.
Stemming from these requirements, COOPER’s main technological objective is to develop and test a model-driven, extensible environment that supports in Bdividual and collective competency building in virtual teams, whose members are geographically dispersed, have different backgrounds and competencies, working together in projects to solve complex problems.

Outcomes:
The COOPER project will achieve this goal by focusing on and providing the following results:

• Create a reference model for cooperative teamwork processes;
• Create validated pedagogical scenarios and assessment strategies;
• Create and test tools to support knowledge co-construction, sharing and re-use;
• Create a common COOPER software platform in which these models, scenarios, strategies and tools are integrated;
• Gather requirements as well as pilot results and evaluations in representative case studies.

All results delivered by the project will contribute to forming a protected, shared COOPER environment, that will be easily deployed over any University’s or Company’s Intranet. The COOPER environment will feature the use of advanced technology (e.g. VOI) provided by two small SMEs at the forefront of EU innovation edge.

Project leader and researchers involved:
- Project leader: Jan van Bruggen
- Team members: Ellen Rusman, Bas Giesbers, Howard Spoelstra

Project partners:
• L3S Research Center / Universität Hannover (Germany)
• ASP Alta Scuola Politecnica (Italy)
• Politecnico di Milano (Italy)
• Web Models s.r.l. (Italy)
• Abbeynet S.p.A. (Italy)
• CoWare, Inc. (Italy)
• ALaRI - Università della Svizzera italiana (Italy)
• University Politehnica of Bucharest (Romania)

Planning (including current status):
Begin date: December 1st, 2005
End date: December 1st, 2007

Current status (until 19/01/07):
All planned deliverables were issued in time and are accessible from the COOPER Project web site. Work addressed includes:
- Detailed requirements for the test sites (by ASP, AlaRI, and CoWare).
- Specification of a model language extension.
- State of the art on recommender systems and latent semantic analysis.
- First specification of Virtual Company scenario for Cooper.
- Specification of evaluation framework.
- First version of Cooper platform with integrated video conferencing.
The project received a favourable review early December 2006.

Relations with other projects within the Development Programme:
- ASA
Cooper will build on work on community formation started in the ASA project
- TENCompetence
Cooper will share work on modelling of didactical scenarios and assessments with TenCompetence