| This research presents an information system design theory (ISDT) to integrate notification and recommendation systems (NARS) into an online discussion forum and usable on mobile devices. The integration is designed to overcome the issue of long delays in response that occurs in traditional online discussion forums. The expected effects of NARS are explained using a proposed conceptual model. That is, notification increases participants' awareness of posts and recommendation reduces the effect of participants' information overload; as a result, the time between posts should be shortened and the pattern of the interaction should be altered.;The design theory, which can be used as a guideline to design an instance of NARS, is described using eight components of an ISDT proposed by Gregor and Jones (2007). The design theory features awareness and information overload as kernel theories. A prototype of the design artifact was developed as an instantiation of the design theory. It includes three components, which are an online discussion forum, Android and iPhone mobile app, and recommender engine.;In order to empirically validate the design theory, an experiment was conducted to test whether NARS can improve the quality of online discussion. The experiment included 254 students from seven courses. The data generated from the experiment were collected in four different ways: surveys, group interviews, mobile application logs, and forum logs in order to measure awareness, information overload, and quality of discussion. Moreover, the research suggested farness, which is a single number, as a metric to measure the quality of discussion instead of using multiple geometry-of-discussion measures.;The results from the experiment support the hypothesized overall effect of NARS. However, the research found that notification is expensive; therefore, it seems like a good idea to allow the participants to define the number of messages that they would like to receive per day. In addition, the research also found that notification messages the participants find useful mostly help them to achieve particular goals, the mobile app is complementary to the online discussion forum website, and online discussion forums that allow participants to freely post are likely to have better quality. |
