implementing a virtual community of interest at capella university
The School of Business and Technology (SOBT) at Capella University has embarked on a "Community of Interest" (COI) pilot implementation aimed at enriching the experience of learners and faculty engaged in its online academic environment. The COI achieves this goal by providing a feature-rich set of avenues for communication and collaboration on a social networking platform. This interaction encourages the free sharing, reviewing, and generation of knowledge, facilitating learner-learner, learner-faculty, and faculty-faculty interaction and supporting the research process. For Ph.D. learners, the COI bridges the gap between the online classrooms and face-to-face residency sessions. For faculty, it provides a place to collaborate and communicate about a variety of issues and projects outside of meetings and conference calls.. An earlier paper [9] provided the rationale for building a virtual COI for stakeholders outside the confines of online classrooms. This paper reports on the experience gained by implementing a pilot social networking website serving the needs of those Ph.D. learners and faculty in specializations related to Information Technology (IT) or IT Management. The website was first implemented utilizing the social networking tool Elgg". Migration to LifeRay" is underway. The paper describes the platform capabilities, user activities, benefits observed, and user experience in this pilot implementation. It suggests best practices intended to keep the COI flourishing and allow the expansion of the COI to a wider learner and faculty community at the university level.
community of interest social networking education