Teaching

Persuasive Technology Books on ShelfLab Director, Dr. BJ Fogg BJ Fogg teaches at least one class a year at Stanford, usually for the Department of Computer Science. From time to time, he’s appointed to Stanford’s School of Education‘s consulting faculty.

Dr. Fogg creates a new class each time he teaches. His courses focus on some aspect of persuasive technology.

Past Classes

 

The goal of was to help students become experts in designing behavior sequences that lead to long-term change. Specifically, students learned how to discover what sequences of behaviors create desirable health habits, such as exercise and meditation. The course also examined how digital platforms (primarily web and mobile) enhance research and design of behavior sequences. Students applied methods for analyzing and designing behaviors sequences to solve challenges in health: physical activity, nutrition, and stress reduction.

  • and course info.
  • from the class.

Behavior Design for Calming Technology (2011)

In this course, students studied three components: (1) what causes stress, (2) categories of calming mechanisms, and (3) persuasive design. They worked on two projects, Text2Calm and SocialCalm, and collectively developed a genre of technologies that increase emotional, cognitive, or physiological calm through mobile phones.

Creating Health Habits via Social and Mobile Tech (2010)

The overall goal for this class was for students to become experts in using technology to create habits in everyday people. The course focused on health behaviors, creating new habits, and using social networks and mobile phones as channels of persuasion.

Persuasive Online Video (2009)

This course focused on how online video can change people’s behaviors. In this course, we studied new methods for creating persuasive video, with a focus on metrics in guiding iterative design. Students created videos and campaigns to achieve target behaviors of their own choosing.

Psychology of Facebook (2008)

The goal of the class was to make each student an expert on the psychology of Facebook, especially in how persuasion works in that social network.

Peace Innovation (2008)

The course goal was to learn how to invent peace, and then to create resources for others to do the same. Students worked in small teams to run peace innovation trials with Web 2.0 technology.

Apps for Facebook (2007)

This course focused on optimizing Facebook apps by learning the psychology of Facebook and using engagement metrics to make good product decisions.

Earlier Courses

Earlier courses taught by Dr. Fogg included: Mobile Persuasion (2006), Captology Design Methods (2005) and Web Credibility (2000).

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