In higher education, a purpose network is an online community intentionally designed to support critical student learning outcomes through peer-to-peer, peer-to-staff, and staff-to-peer communication.
“Progressive universities are capitalizing on these fundings by creating focused, intentional online purpose networks to facilitate their institutional goals.
In a college student purpose network, universities seek to instill and provide platforms to support institutional learning outcomes.
They are bidirectional communicative platforms going far above and beyond email as a means of communication.”[1] As an example, in order to support student success and retention initiatives, institutions may use purpose networks as part of a strategy to follow recommendations from retention literature to: increase academic and social integration,[2] mattering and marginality,[3] and engagement.
University purpose networks take advantage of the two-way communication afforded by Web 2.0 and includes content such as written articles, self-assessment surveys, peer-peer connections, profiles, discussions boards, groups, reviews of places, online curricula and more.