Building Social Capital in Higher Education With Online Opportunistic Social Matching

Building Social Capital in Higher Education With Online Opportunistic Social Matching

Daniel Raymond Trí Đặng Firpo, Sonya Zhang, Lorne Olfman, Kittisak Sirisaengtaksin, Joe Tawan Roberts
Copyright: © 2021 |Pages: 18
DOI: 10.4018/IJSMOC.2021010101
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Abstract

Recently, colleges and universities have been forced to utilize distance learning. With students spending less time on campus, their sense of community may decrease because they would be less likely to participate in the community. This puts higher education commuter institutions at a disadvantage in terms of generating and maintaining social capital. The authors investigate the possibility to counter this disadvantage by actively promoting participation in a mobile online social network (OSN) supported by a context-aware notification and recommender system (NARS) to achieve opportunistic social matching, which mitigates information overload by considering each user's relational, social, and personal context as predictors of match opportunities. The results suggest that introducing a purposefully designed OSN has the potential to facilitate the creation of structural and relational social capital, but that it might not have an effect on cognitive social capital.
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1. Introduction

This study focuses on the design of a recommender system in an Online Social Network (OSN) and the potential effects that an opportunistic social matching application that uses push recommendations can have on a scholarly community. Informed by the Design Science approach of Hevner et al. (2004), the artifact design serves as a starting point for exploring the following questions: How would it affect the sense of community amongst the members of an OSN? In what ways would it affect the level of social capital in student and alumni communities? What would be the effect of such an app on the ability of students and alumni to harness the social capital that exists in their social network?

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