Lab 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

 

Behavior Design for Better Health (2012)

The goal of this course 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.

• View the syllabus and course info.
• View the top 8 projects 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.

• View the syllabus.
• Read the class blog.
• Check out the Twitter stream (#calmingtech).

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.

• View the Facebook Group for the class.

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.

• Visit the Facebook Group for the class.

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.

• Visit the Facebook Group for the class.

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.

• Check out the Facebook Group.
• View the Peace Innovation course video archives
• Visit the Stanford Peace Innovation Lab

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.

• View the Facebook Group for the class.
• 10 Million in 10 Weeks: What Stanford Learned Building Facebook Apps (Slideshare presentation)

Earlier Courses

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