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The purpose of this paper is to present a straightforward technique for engaging students and building a sense of community in the university classroom by allowing students to give brief extra‐credit presentations on topics of personal interest.

The paper includes an overview of the literature related to engagement and “sense of community,” a discussion of the motivation for incorporating “off‐topic” presentations in the university classroom, a description of the presentation requirements and grading practices, and comments on the results of employing the presentations. Because individual perceptions were the goal of this research, survey methodology was used. All items were measured on a five‐point Likert scale and administered to students at the end of the most recent term.

Using survey results, factor analysis, and regression, the paper finds that the presentations increased student attentiveness and fostered a sense of community in the classes in which the presentations were employed.

This research presents a unique method – the use of off‐topic presentations – to increase sense of community in the university classroom.

Several challenges of today’s higher education were motivations to reconsider the contents and formats of lectures and tutorials and to conceive the classroom communication system Backstage, a social media platform supporting a novel form of large-class teaching. The purpose of this paper is to report on the challenges met, on the novel teaching form and on an evaluation of this teaching form.

The use of Backstage in two courses is evaluated. One of the courses has been specially adapted to promote student participation, the other course has been held in a traditional way. To investigate the usefulness and acceptance of Backstage in the given settings the data collected on Backstage and student responses in surveys are analyzed.

The results indicate that Backstage can foster interactivity and awareness in large-class lectures when used in combination with a teaching format that provides opportunities for and encourges lecture-relevant communication. Furthermore, students appreciated the use of Backstage.

This paper reports on a case study which lacks generalizability. Further studies under controlled conditions and of the learning effectiveness of the approach are still outstanding.

This paper describes an approach fostering a form of Active Learning in large classes. Since large classes are widespread in higher education, the approach has a considerable practical potential.

The paper describes an approach to large class higher education teaching in using social media.

Similar results have not been published so far.

This paper seeks to report on the conception of a novel digital backchannel, Backstage, dedicated to large classes, aiming at empowering not only the audience but also the speaker, at promoting the awareness of both audience and speaker, and at promoting an active participation of students in the lecture. In learning settings with a large and typically passive audience, the goal of Backstage is to foster active participation and facilitate collaboration akin to small‐learning groups.

The authors present the concept of a novel kind of digital backchannel that supports different forms of inter‐student communication via short microblog messages, social evaluation, and ranking of messages by the audience. The backchannel further supports immediate concise feedback to the lecturer of selected and aggregated students' opinions, making it possible to strengthen the lecturer's awareness of students' difficulties.

The concept is the outcome of a joint effort between computer scientists and educational scientists, and unifies technical and usability aspects with educational claims.

The concept combines computer‐mediated communication with elements of social media that not only foster active participation and collaboration among a large and otherwise passive audience, but also provide social means to self‐regulation and management of the backchannel discourse. The design of the backchannel is strongly influenced by findings of educational sciences.

The purpose of this paper is to contribute knowledge regarding the nature of successful and unsuccessful value co-creation processes between firms and brand communities and the strategies used to address the latter.

The paper draws on a netnographic study of the online collaborative platform known as Alfisti.com, which carmaker Alfa Romeo launched to enhance co-creation with its most devoted consumers, the “Alfisti”.

The findings identify three groups of collaborative practices: interacting, identity and organizing practices. The paper details how firm and brand community members enact the elements – procedures, understandings and engagements – of collaborative practices and how the alignment of these enactments impacts value co-creation.

The paper suggests that co-creation of value succeeds when the enactment of collaborative practices aligns, i.e. when firm and brand community members enact practices in a similar way, and that co-creation fails when the enactment of practices misaligns. Firms and brand communities use three realignment strategies – compliance, interpretation and orientation – to address the misalignment and failure of co-creation. The fact that the research draws on a single qualitative case study is a limitation.

Managerial implications include using realignment strategies to manage firm-brand community co-creation.

Creating an empirical-based framework regarding successful and failing co-creation and how the latter is addressed in the context of brand community makes the paper original.

Choosing a programming method necessitates that the company examines its own policies and composition. The reports of other firms' programming efforts are helpful only where the same or similar problems exist and where the two companies are enough alike to make valid generalizations. Before inquiring into the specific differences of the programming methods, many firms have found it helpful to review their positions on three matters; (1) the topics they intend to program, (2) the priority among these topics, and (3) the available financial support for programming. Some firms approach deciding what topics to program by asking, ‘What are the activities within this company in which programming would produce the greatest result?’ For example, many retail stores have chosen their basic sales systems as the lead‐off topics because they feel that the crucial sell or no sell decisions are most affected by the sales person's approach and knowledge of selling. On the other hand, in a chemical company where safety is a key problem and one mistake could kill many people, programming safety techniques will have top priority. Closely related to this profit or necessity approach to programming is the question of how much the company has to invest and over what time period. Purchasing 500 programs which cost $20 each means a direct outlay of $10 000 plus the indirect costs of training wages and support personnel once the programs are put into use.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate longitudinal features of an established social question-answering (Q&A) site to study how question-answer resources and other community features change over time.

Statistical analysis and visualisation was performed on the full data dump from the Stack Overflow social Q&A site for programmers.

The timing of answers is as strong a predictor of acceptance – a proxy for user satisfaction – as the structural features of provided answers sometimes associated with quality. While many questions and answer exchanges are short-lived, there is a small yet interesting subset of questions where new answers receive community approval and which may end up being ranked more highly than early answers.

As a large-scale data oriented research study, this work says little about user motivations to find and contribute new knowledge to old questions or about the impact of the resource on the consumer. This will require complementary studies using qualitative and evaluative methods.

While content contribution to social question-asking is largely undertaken within a very short time frame, content consumption is usually over far longer periods. Methods and incentives by which content can be updated and maintained need to be considered. This work should be of interest to knowledge exchange community designers and managers.

Few studies have looked at temporal patterns in social Q&A and how time and the moderation and voting systems employed may shape resource quality.

The learning outcomes sought by social studies educators emphasize critical thinking, deep content knowledge, and an understanding of how knowledge in the disciplines of social studies is created and changes. Achieving these outcomes, calls for a more active, collaborative, and student-centered pedagogy. The reported study seeks to better understand the nature of student engagement in this kind of pedagogy by closely examining student discourse during instruction. The study reveals while academic tasks were well thought out and, on the surface, constructivist in nature; student discourse was almost entirely oriented toward producing good products with little thinking aimed at exploring the meanings and relationships among content. The study also demonstrates that redesigning the nature of classroom tasks, by presenting students with problems that necessitate thinking about how content is inter-related, results in readily discernable deepening of student discourse.

Software developers extensively use stack overflow (SO) for knowledge sharing on software development. Thus, software engineering researchers have started mining the structured/unstructured data present in certain software repositories including the Q&A software developer community SO, with the aim to improve software development. The purpose of this paper is show that how academics/practitioners can get benefit from the valuable user-generated content shared on various online social networks, specifically from Q&A community SO for software development.

A comprehensive literature review was conducted and 166 research papers on SO were categorized about software development from the inception of SO till June 2016.

Most of the studies revolve around a limited number of software development tasks; approximately 70 percent of the papers used millions of posts data, applied basic machine learning methods, and conducted investigations semi-automatically and quantitative studies. Thus, future research should focus on the overcoming existing identified challenges and gaps.

The work on SO is classified into two main categories; “SO design and usage” and “SO content applications.” These categories not only give insights to Q&A forum providers about the shortcomings in design and usage of such forums but also provide ways to overcome them in future. It also enables software developers to exploit such forums for the identified under-utilized tasks of software development.

The study is the first of its kind to explore the work on SO about software development and makes an original contribution by presenting a comprehensive review, design/usage shortcomings of Q&A sites, and future research challenges.