[edit] CSCW: Designing Online Communities

Syllabus

Course Description

Online communities are becoming an increasing part of how we work, play, learn, conduct commerce, organize politically, and receive social support. This course is intended to provide students with the knowledge to understand what distinguishes effective from ineffective online communities and the skills to design effective ones. For the purpose of this course, an online community is defined loosely as a group of people who sustain interaction over time and who conduct a substantial portion of their communication online. Because there is no practical instruction manual for designing online communities, this will be a research-oriented class. We will review relevant literature in social psychology and economics on commitment and contribution to groups and mine this science as the basis for design. Students will use this knowledge to redesign a portion of an online community to improve it and systematically examine the consequences of their redesign. The goals are to bridge social science research about what gets people to develop commitment to groups and more engineering/applied questions of how to design online communities to make them successful. The course will cover such types of communities as open source development projects, health support groups, and massively multi-player games. It will deal with such conceptual issues as the basis of commitment to groups, free riding and other motivational problems, online conversation, recruitment, socialization and retention, and group work.

[edit] The Design of Online Communities

• Institution: Georgia Institute of Technology
• Year: 2006
• Instructor: Amy Bruckman

Focus of the Course Online communties are becoming an increasing part of how we work, play, and learn. But how are they designed? What are they really good for? Why are some communities more successful than others? What are the key issues in this field of research? At the completion of this course, students will be able to: * Understand important features of online interactions, * Analyze online interactions critically, * Design an online community, and * Understand the research issues in this field. While students will not actually found a new community as part of this class, students whose designs are promising may be invited to do so either as an independent study or as sponsored research over the summer or next fall. However, please keep in mind that starting such a community implies an ongoing commitment to the real people who chose to become members.

[edit] The Sociology of Cyberspace: Online Communities and Markets

• Institution: UCLA
• Year: 2003
• Instructor: Peter Kollock