Gain a basic conceptual understanding of what CORBA provides.
CORBA exists as a standardized way to create distributed software systems.
CORBA allows the components of an application to exist across a network of computers, while still allowing the components to interact as a whole.
The general concept, as depicted below, is often called distributed computing.

You are probably familiar with applications that perform work using other distributed computing models, but that do not make use of CORBA. In fact, the entire World Wide Web is a perfect example.

Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) is an architecture and specification for creating, distributing, and managing distributed program objects in a network. The architecture allows programs at different locations and developed by different vendors to communicate in a network through an "interface broker."
CORBA was developed by a consortium of vendors through the (OMG) Object Management Group, which currently includes over 500 member companies.
Both International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and X/Open have authorized CORBA as the standard architecture for distributed objects (which are also known as components). CORBA 3 is the latest level.