Concourse: the design of an online collaborated writing center

The project presented here is Concourse. The project is aiming at the development of an online writing community as a study support environment for student in Higher Education. Concourse is the name of an online collaborated writing center and is intended as a virtual space for online interaction, a place for collaborated writing in a knowledge rich environment. It offers services required for professional development of students and for the development and exploitation of knowledge about scientific writing. Examples of services provided by the system are services for information access, information dissemination, communication, study rooms, research, support, coaching, training and study, and knowledge management. In this paper, we present our design research approach that we applied in the Concourse project. After that, we elaborate on the design guidelines and the online collaborated writing center Concourse based on these guidelines, as a part of this approach.