This course is intended to help students understand and analyze communities that are formed in or maintained via online environments. Although there is a fair bit of disagreement about the definition of community (and therefore, online community), we will loosely use ‘community’ as a term to describe a group of people who engage in sustained interaction over time. The group may be held together by a common identity, a collective purpose, or merely by the individual utility gained from the interactions. We will use the terms e-community and online community interchangeably, as shorthand, both for communities that conduct all of their interactions online and for communities that use online interaction to supplement face-to-face interactions. The course introduces students to important concepts, terms, and theories that will help them understand how online communities are used by millions of people every day for a variety of purposes. The course develops a language for discussing online communities critically, and applying those concepts to new designs. The major component of this class is a group project where students apply the readings, theories, and empirical findings from the class to critique an existing online community or design a new one.