Improve the efficiency of collaboration through the global task scheduling in a learning assessment grid

The computer and the Internet have brought human with great capabilities of collaborating across geographically distributed places. With the booming of grid technology and service-oriented computing (SOC), it´s possible for people to solve problems collaboratively through the large-scale sharing and coordinated use of resources. Learning assessment grid (LAGrid) is a service-oriented grid system that addresses the formative assessment problem in e-learning. One goal of LAGrid is to support the wide-area resource sharing and the cross-organizational collaborative work. A kind of special resource in the LAGrid is human resources. Because of the unbalanced distribution of tutors in different organizations, it´s very important for tutors to work collaboratively across the boundaries of organizations transparently. In this paper, we propose a global task schedule model to support the cross-organizational collaborative work. The performance of the model is analyzed and compared with a local schedule model. The result shows that the global schedule model is more efficient. The proposed model has been implemented and deployed in the LAGrid.