Development of an e-Workshop through Design Science Research

This paper demonstrates that free software combined with design science research can create meaningful web tools aiming at solving organizational problems by sharing and co-creating relevant information. The core output of the research conducted consists of an educational website about sponsoring for an international student organization including instructive videos and interactive documents. I developed a first prototype with freeware from Google, TechSmith and Apple, which was evaluated by 34 organization members from 22 different countries during an internal organizers' conference. I guided all conference participants through the website and asked them to suggest both technical and content-related modifications. Consequently 7 alterations were implemented. In a further step, 5 organization members evaluated the modified prototype for the second time using their own IT equipment. The second feedback resulted in several more changes. The final version constitutes an e- workshop that was positively evaluated on the criteria accessibility, fun and utility. As a by-product, this paper may serve members of student organizations as a guideline about how to create free, video-centered, educational websites.