WP1. Collaborative TeamWork Processes

WP1 is concerned with designing the team management processes which are most suitable for supporting a project-centered learning pedagogical approach. The emphasis of this WP is on the specification of a reference framework for project-centered learning encompassing and generalizing the needs of the three user institutions. Thus, the WP covers all the phases of the project-centered learning process, going from pre-project activities, to project management, to post-project assessment and after-project consolidation of results as persistent assets for external use and for internal reuse. From a technological viewpoint, this WP includes the support of process descriptions by means of visual tools which are compatible with the WebML (http://www.webml.org ) notation used in WP4 and therefore enable a very fast and easily extensible/customizable development of Web application skeletons.
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WP2. Pedagogical scenarios and assessments for competency building in virtual teams

The goal of WP2 is to model pedagogical scenarios for collaborative learning in virtual teams and the associated assessments, in formats compliant to interoperability specifications. The WP envisages supporting competency building as well as competency assessment in heterogeneous virtual teams in a variety of settings. There is a plethora of instruments and interventions that might stimulate competency building and various types of assessment may be used to evaluate the outcomes. Consistent pedagogical scenarios are needed that are based on collaborative learning and assessment that is in line with this learning.
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WP3: Knowledge Sharing and Recommendation Services for Collaborative Teamwork Processes

Collaborative learning is social learning, and personalization in a collaborative learning environment is therefore mainly driven by social processes, recommendations and knowledge sharing. The main task of this work package is therefore to investigate, design and implement social recommendation and knowledge sharing mechanisms suitable for the project-centered scenarios this proposal focuses on. The recommendation algorithms will utilize context models for project-centred learning and work defined as processes in WP1 and pedagogical scenarios in WP2. In addition, the recommendations will be biased with learner profiles created as results of learners' interactions and learner assessment as defined in WP2. In addition, WP3 will investigate latent semantic analysis of project and learner portfolios and discussion forums, especially useful in the context of group formation based on project results created, issues discussed, and documents used. The recommendation and knowledge-sharing algorithms and their prototypes will be integrated in WP4 by means of web services or at the model level as operation and interaction units.
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WP4: Infrastructure for Cooperative TeamWork Processes

The objective of this project is to build a Web-based infrastructure which will support the development of applications for distance cooperation of students on complex projects in a distributed training system. The technology will be supported by a model-driven approach, with a particular emphasis on flexibility and adaptation. The main aspects featured by this infrastructure are: tight integration of the asynchronous Web application with synchronous tools, supported by using state-of-the-art VOI (voice over internet) technology; ease of deployment (by means of code generators), ease of customisation (by means of wizards), ease of use (by all the actors of the process, including administrators, students, academic tutors and mentors, industrial tutors and mentors, general public, alumni).
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WP5: Case Studies and Evaluation

WP5 covers the three case studies of the COOPER project: ALaRI and ASP represent higher education, LT Design Software represents the industry. The goal of the case studies is to collect requirements of real learning providers so as to provide input to research and development WPs, and then demonstrate the applicability of the scenarios and of the pedagogical and recommendation strategies that are integrated in the COOPER environment and eventually delivered by WP4. This WP also includes the overall evaluation of the Cooper approach.
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WP6: Dissemination and Exploitation

The objective of this WP is to manage knowledge diffusion from COOPER consortium towards the rest of the scientific community, guaranteeing that knowledge acquired by the user organisations accessing the COOPER solutions will be extended to a much wider scientific community.
We distinguish actions of internal dissemination (i.e., internal to the organization involved in one of the use cases) and external dissemination (performed not only by the whole partnership in a "conventional" way but, more specifically, by the partners involved in use cases towards their communities of partners/customers).
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