Communities of Practice: guidelines for the design of online seminars in higher education

This article focuses on the Community of Practice (CoP) concept and its implications for designing online seminars in the university context. Student learning in seminars at universities is seen as peripheral participation in a particular scientific community?one of the many knowledge- creating CoPs that constitute a university. Introducing information technology into university education thus should be measured by the degree to which these new ways of teaching enhance students? access to scientific communities. This framing view of university education is connected to a social theory of learning where learning is seen as an essentially social, situated phenomenon. The concept of ?legitimate peripheral participation? in a community of practice is used to derive a design framework for online seminars. Using this framework, the authors implemented an online seminar on the topic of organisational knowledge management at the Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria. The GroupWare platform BSCW (Basic Support for Cooperative Work) was used for the exclusively asynchronous communication during the 10-week course. Of particular interest were the ways in which students, invited guest experts and the instructor interacted without ever meeting face to face. Assessment of the seminar and its comparison with previously held face-to-face seminars shows that the CoP concept can offer valuable guidelines for the design of online university courses.