Concurrent Learning in Virtual Organisations

Learning is a continuous process that does not come to an end when one leaves school or university. In case of virtual organisations, it is important that the personnel from different local entities that are linked together shares the same knowledge, at the same level, and updates the knowledge consistently and permanently. The paper presents a cooperative distributed learning system and shows how the facilities provided by the system make it well fitted for continuos learning in virtual organisations. The architecture of the system is a multi-agent one, human and artificial agents collaborating together to achieve the learning task. The development of the system was triggered by the necessities of training both developers and users of high-performance computing in the framework of the CoLaborator project. A case study in this domain is presented to highlight the facilities of the environment.