Embedding Interactivity into a University Study Portal by Using Social Computing

In this paper, we present how a university study portal was enhanced by adding social computing elements to it, such as the possibility to create study groups, comment upon lectures, exercises and other users´ activity, chat, publish information and others. These added interactivity to the formerly used portal, which was already very popular among the students of Aalto University in Helsinki. The prototype was evaluated using two different methods: a quick and deep evaluation, involving a total of 32 people. After the collection and evaluation of the results, it was obvious that the new social features added significant value to the old system in use and are worth further implementation.