Building Wider Team Cooperation Projects from Lessons Learned in Open Communities of Practice

Communities of Practice (CoP) are a cornerstone in the design and innovation process of knowledge acquisition and knowledge transfer. This paper presents an empirical evaluation of an experimental Open Community of Practice (OCoP), designed to deliver a programming course. The empirical model fosters cooperation between communities which share similar learning objectives. The results show that knowledge transfer is highly increased when a formation paradigm is used together with a set of cooperation tools. A scalability model has been extracted from the results of this experimental community. The model is currently being used as a launching platform to start an open collaborative learning environment to connect two communities of practice, one located in Italy and the other in the United States.