This study was a cross-case comparison analysis of paired case studies of instructors and students in five first-year online college composition courses at a community college. The purpose of the study was to learn about “community” in these courses and the effects of community on the students' writing. Specifically, the study documented and discussed the instructors' beliefs, perspectives, policies, and practices concerning community in their online writing classes; the study also documented and discussed students' beliefs, perspectives, and experiences concerning community in their online classes. Each of the five online courses was observed from start to finish, and the study also analyzed the students' participation in the course communities and the writing they produced for the courses. A series of in-depth interviews with each pair of participants, along with observations of the courses and analyses of written artifacts from the various courses were the primary sources of data. The key findings of this study were: the prevalence of social constructivist theory and pedagogy in online writing courses; the necessity of policy and accountability in successfully building community; the theoretical versus practical value of community in the online writing course; the limited role of community when influencing students' writing; and the disparities between instructors' intentions and students' experiences of community. / Dissertation Chair: Dr. Gian Pagnucci Dissertation Committee Members: Dr. Michael Williamson and Dr. Nicholas Mauriello

This study examines the motivations of participants in networked, large-scale content production and research a paradigm of distributed work magnified by the Internet. This has come to be called crowdsourcing. The approach taken in examining the crowdsourcing paradigm is of retrospection, with a study focused on observed examples and existing theories. Thirteen cases of existing crowdsourcing sites were selected for study, from a larger sample of 300. These cases were coded by their site properties and analyzed, identifying possible motivational mechanisms. Subsequent interviews with eight medium to heavy Internet users further explored these features, with an emphasis on ranking relative importance of various motivators. This study concludes with a series of recommendations on motivating crowds in such projects, emphasizing among others the importance of topical interest, ease of participation, and appeals to the individuals knowledge. In addition to base motivators, a number of support, or secondary, motivators are outlined.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2006. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

Institutions of higher education are harnessing the communication ability of the Internet to offer classes and academic degree programs. This study investigated adult students during their first semester in a distance delivered doctoral program. The purpose of the study was to examine the use of web-based communication tools and their ability to establish a community of practice enabling the new students to share solutions related to distance doctoral study. This case study included the entire cohort of a distance delivered Ed.D. in Agricultural Education administered jointly by Texas Tech and Texas A&M Universities. Data collection methods included a semi-structured telephone interview, containing an adapted Sense of Community Index and postings on a Wiki (editable web page). Data analysis produced a participants’ profile and their use of web-based communication tools. This study found that (a) a variety of web-based tools enabled the students to connect with their cohort on a routine basis, (b) it is possible to establish a community of practice using a variety of web-based communication tools, (c) after one semester the cohort is an embryonic community of practice (d) the students were able to assist each other with concerns that helped them acclimate to learning online and their doctoral program, (e) students appreciate the flexibility that distance education offers but some prefer a traditional education, (f) students were frustrated with the technology during the first few weeks of their program, (g) new doctoral students desire instruction in the use of the course management system, the online library, and scholarly writing, (h) the students feel a strong sense of community, (i) use of web-based communication tools are vital as they assist in the student’s learning, (j) students felt isolated from their cohort until they participated in a group project even though they had the use of web-based communication tools at their disposal. The results of this study suggest that opportunities for students to engage socially with their peers should be built into the design of online classes and degree programs. Future research is recommended to examine the sustainability and desirability of virtual communities of practice.

<p>This Research sets out to understand the participation experiences of a selected group of adult learners at one of the partner institutionsof the online Intercontinental Masters in Adult Learning and Global Change. The study offers an understanding of adult learners' experiences of success and persistence in relation to online study within a higher education context, and also offers insights into what may costitute successful learning communities. In relation to literature, , the student perceptions obtained via the study largely affirm what 'successiful' can mean to a group of postgraduate adult learners in an online learning environment. This stidy also contributes to the ongoing conversation in terms of the unique experiences of students in one particular cohort of the programme.</p>

Title: Online consumer sales promotion in retail clothing companies – a study of four American companies’ websites. Authors: Emma Berter and Christina Blomqvist Advisor: Venilton Reinert Level: Bachelor thesis in Marketing, (15 Swedish credits), Spring 2010 Keywords: Online marketing, marketing mix, consumer sales promotion Question: How can retail clothing companies use consumer sales promotion to try to increase sales on their websites? Purpose: The purpose was to investigate how consumer sales promotion can be used on retail clothing companies’ websites to increase sales. Method: This thesis is done as a qualitative research and with a deductive approach since we have studied theories and then done our own research. The data collected for this research was taken exclusively from the websites of the companies chosen to be a part of this research. Theoretical framework: This chapter is introduced with theories regarding online marketing which is followed by a section on the marketing mix online. Further a closer look is done at one of the devices of the marketing mix; the promotion tools. There are five promotion tools existing and in this thesis a closer look is taken at the sales promotion tool. Consumer sales promotion which is one of the sales promotion tools are then at focus and the reader will through this chapter develop a deeper understanding for the different ways of using consumer sales promotion online. Empirical studies: The empirical studies consist of data collected when the websites of the companies have been studied. Conclusions: Through the research that has been made and through comparison with theories studied, conclusions hav

One way to strengthen the bond between popular applications and their online user communities is to integrate the applications with their communities, so users are able to observe and communicate with other users. The result of this integration is a Multiuser Online Application (MOA). The problem studied in this thesis is that MOA users and systems will be overloaded with information generated by large communities and complex applications. The solution investigated was to filter the amount of information delivered to users while attempting to preserve the benefits of dwelling in a MOA environment. This strategy was evaluated according to the amount of information it was capable of reducing and the effects as seen by MOA users. It was found that filtering could be used to substantially reduce the information exchanged by users while still providing users with the benefits of integrating application and community.

Content Management Systems (CMSs) are widely used to create online communities supporting organizations, classes, and groups. These communities provide various functionalities, e.g. discussion forums, shared repositories for documents and links, collaborative spaces, and different communication channels, like chat or instant messaging. Often the range of functionalities offered is unnecessarily rich, and some remain unused, leading to cluttered users workspaces and difficulties in finding information. Currently, communities that are developed with CMS do not allow user customization. Even for the community owner (e.g. a teacher, a group manager), it is hard to customize the functionality and interface of a community, because this requires some programming skills. I have designed new CMS allowing users of an online community (both owners and regular users) to design and configure their personal view of the communitys dashboard by adding the functionalities that are present in the communitys homepage and arranging them on the screen according to their preferences.

Motivated by the popularity of marketplace applications over social net works, we study optimal recommendation algorithms for online exchange markets. Examples of such markets include peerflix. corn and readitswapit.co.uk. We model these markets as a social network in which each user has two as sociated lists: The item list, i.e, the set of items the user is willing to give away, and the wish list, i.e., the set of items the user is interested in receiv ing. A transaction involves a user giving an item to another user. Users are motivated to engage in transactions in expectation of realizing their wishes. Wishes may be realized by a pair of users swapping items corresponding to each other’s wishes, but more generally by means of users exchanging items through a cycle, where each user gives an item to the next user in a cycle, in accordance with the receiving user’s wishes. In this thesis, we first consider the problem of how to efficiently gener ate recommendations for item exchange cycles in an online market social network. We consider deterministic and probabilistic models and show that under both models, the problem of determining an optimal set of recommen dations that maximizes the expected value of items exchanged is NP-hard and develop efficient approximation algorithms for both models. Next, we study exchange markets over time and try to optimize users’ waiting times, and fairness whereby fairness we mean: give higher priority to users who contribute more to the system in addition to maximizing expected value. We show that by introducing the concept of points, average waiting time can be improved by a large factor. By designing a credit system, we try to maxi mize fairness in the system. We show not only is the fairness optimization problem NP-hard, but also inapproximable within any multiplicative factor. We propose two heuristic algorithms, one of which is based on rounding the solution to a linear programming relaxation and the other is a greedy algorithm. For both the one-shot market and the overtime market studied in this thesis, we conduct a comprehensive set of experiments, and explore the performance and also scalability of the proposed algorithms. Our experiments suggest that the performance of our algorithms in practice could be much better than the worst-case performance guarantee factors.

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