COOPER - Collaborative Open Environment for Project Centered Learning
COOPER has researched how ICTs can support individual and collective competency building in remote project teams.
- Strategic objective: Technology-enhanced Learning
- Project type: Specific targeted research project (STREP)
- Start date: 1 December 2005
- Duration: 24 months
- EU funding: 1 950 000
- Number of partners: 8
- Project coordinator: L3S Research Center and Leibniz University Hanover, Germany
- Contact: Mr. Xuan Zhou (Ph.D.)
Background
Research results show that, regardless of the subject matter, students working in collaborative groups tend to learn more of what is taught and appear more satisfied with their classes. In recent years, project-centred collaborative learning has been increasingly employed by modern universities and corporation training teams. However, for most multinational companies and universities, it is difficult to establish this form of learning among geographically dispersed learners. The COOPER project has created an online environment that supports project-centred collaborative learning, anytime and anywhere.
Approaches
COOPER conducted extensive case studies in real-world universities and companies specialised in various subjects. R&D work was driven by the following general requirements:
- Defining a set of team management processes that are most suitable for supporting project-centred learning;
- Creating knowledge sharing and recommendation services to facilitate collaborative teamwork processes;
- Proposing pedagogical tools to support competency building and competency assessment in heterogeneous virtual teams;
- Constructing an infrastructure, with a set of telecommunication tools, to support the distant cooperation in a distributed, virtual team.
The COOPER team exploited many advanced technologies for supporting the above requirements, such as dynamic process modelling, web application modelling, virtual companies, recommender systems, latent semantic analysis, VoIP communication. By the end of 2007, the COOPER platform was successfully developed and deployed on three case-study sites for evaluating its usefulness and practicality. Evaluation results showed that the COOPER platform is a useful e-learning tool, highly adaptable for online, university education or company training systems.
Application and deployment
The results of the COOPER project can help universities and corporations improve their infrastructure and methodologies in project-centred learning, especially in the following learning environments:
- Graduate (or post-graduate) university studies, involving students and lecturers participating in focused projects (e.g., masters or specialisation courses) who are located at different institutions and having diverse backgrounds;
- Company universities and company training that involves multi-national participants from company sites; customers which are geographically dispersed and need to participate in launching a new product or technology; or corporate teams involved in product or project-centred training.
From the technology perspective, the project also provided a basis for cross-disciplinary innovations in information technology and related fields.
The integrated COOPER platform is available for downloading from the exploitation page of the COOPER website. It is free for academic users under an academic license agreement. Potential users can find on the website a number of flash demos showing the basic interfaces and functionalities of the COOPER platform.
The project partners will continue to collaborate as a network of expert centres for supporting the exploitation and deployment of the COOPER technologies.