Abstract
This paper presents an innovative method for constituting a community of learners through an online course platform. We examine the role of shared routines in stabilizing patterns of interaction, defining specific skills and required knowledge, consolidating communication, and establishing reputations. While predictability is a core resource for the construction of a productive online community of learners, unpredictability may also be used to harness a special form of continuous, intense involvement. For example, random rewards are often employed as incentives in gamified environments. A flow of transient, ephemeral information may stimulate engagement for fear of 'missing out', while a structured, predictable archiving system allows users to postpone accessing the information until it is urgently required.
On these theoretical considerations, we designed the P.R.Frenzy_Feed platform that combines predictable and unpredictable events to engage users in a community of learning based on shared routines. P.R.Frenzy_Feed is designed as a forum of discussion for instructors and final-year students enrolled in an advanced computer networking course at University Politehnica of Bucharest. Unlike well-accustomed online forums of discussions, P.R.Frenzy_Feed incorporates the principle of 'chaos by design': it is not separated on topic-specific threads but, instead, it is organized (or rather dis-organized) as a single, unified flow of information on all possible topics, by all possible contributors. News about laboratories, exercises, and learning materials come to be interpolated with conversations about favorite horror movies, IT trivia, or other course-unrelated subjects.
In this environment students have to follow attentively and dig after relevant content to keep pace with course requirements. To facilitate such an intense, regular engagement, we introduced a highly predictable Question of the Night mini-competition, in which students answer a riddle posted on the platform at midnight. Ultimately, we tried to create routines of interaction, learning, and informal conversation to constitute the social infrastructure of a community of learners.
The case-study relies on the intermediary and final evaluations of students' and instructors' experience with P.R.Frenzy_Feed, based on semi-structured interviews. Results indicate that a combination of predictability and chaos can be an effective resource to stimulate community building. An important challenge resides in effectively maintaining the promised uniformity in the predictable components, in order to avoid user disengagement. |