Fellow students, I'm in the darkest hour before dawn of an MSc with my thesis due early March. The thesis is based on the success factors of online communities. Latest feedback is that I need more online communities to participate in the research to ensure results are robust. All I need is your quick help filling out a multiple choice survey rating OU's very own Platform. You can even complete the survey anonymously because it's hosted elsewhere so usernames are not linked in any way. There's opportunity at the end of the survey to add your own comments about that one thing that you just really have to rant or rave about. https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/PleaseRatePlatform Feedback on the actual survey itself is, of course, welcome. Please do it now - 5 minutes really can change a life when it comes to achieving a Master's! Thank you and best wishes for your own studies. Shelley
Without reading the survey just in case of bias, I would say that the most important factors for success are A good moderators B personal icons that enable people to get to know each other quickly, C location of individuals to county or nearest large city.revealed. D topic or topics which are rigourously adhered to and E the discouragement of single sentence replies and ripostes..
Gillian you've been able to list factors that are in the short-ish list of research-proposed factors in the survey (slight difference in the way they're phrased) so thanks indeed for those! I suppose I'm quite pleased and surprised at such natural intuition (experience?) in the very first comment. Please do take a look at the other factors in the survey that have been proposed by previous researchers and which I'm trying to prioritise through quantitative methods via survey responses. It will be very interesting to see the perceived importance of each factor vs how users believe Platform performs on each factor. Some other communities in the study have intriguing results but there are definitely 3 strong correlations so far. (No spoilers yet!)
A big thank you to all who completed the online survey - it's closed now and there should be enough data, thanks to you, for a complete set of community data. Best of luck in your own studies!
Hi Shelley. I am glad that you got enough replies to your survey. I apologise for not accessing it but it was taking forever to load. I know University sites are huge, but there are other sites that are. I haven't had this problem on others. Ease of access is a factor I left out. Is an important one!