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

• Create a reference model for cooperative teamwork processes;

• Create interoperable and 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.