The Impact of Co-operation Policies on Participation in Online Learning Object Exchange: A Preliminary Investigation

Abstract

This research investigates the impact of cooperation policies on participation in, and benefits from, online learning object exchanges. First, an in-depth study of issues encountered in other online contexts (peer-to-peer systems, discussion group with lurkers, reputation systems) provided evidence that explicit cooperation policies and motivation techniques could bring benefits to online object exchanges. A case study is presented based on the comparison between two peer-to-peer systems, Mojo Nation and Gnutella, to show how cooperative policies could add value to online communities. This case study highlights several issues, such as the algorithm of pricing/exchange mechanism. Successfully solving these issues will be the key to identifying the benefits of an e-marketplace based online object exchange. An outline of an experimental exchange mechanism is presented, along with a prototype interface for users. To investigate further issues for users, an online scenario-based questionnaire was set up to measure potential users' attitudes towards cooperation policies. The detailed analysis on questionnaire results shows that cooperation policies hold promise to make the online object exchange more efficient. The results also illustrated how a transaction-based community could achieve the following benefits: increase of ROI object value discovery faster repository expansion better motivation through reputation recognition