Building Social Capital in Higher Education With Online Opportunistic Social Matching

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.