I'd like to continue research on MMOs, as I find them an interesting topic. MMOs are very broad and there are a lot of opportunities to learn from them as a sort of "new media" environment. I'm the only returning group member from last semester, so I'd definitely be willing to find new members to keep up the research.

The workload last semester was actually pretty light. The short weekly assignments often involved a bit of reading, but given an entire week to do them, the time investment overall was pretty was minimal. The assignments are mostly to get you to think. The amount of work required for the research project will really depend on the project and your group (a solid group can produce high quality work very quickly), but ultimately it was somewhat light as well. Students formed their own groups last semester; I imagine it will be the same this time around.

Last semester was pretty interesting in many regards. It's hard to pick just one thing, however, in my research project, I discovered that MMO environments and games are actually a fairly active area of substantive academic research. That leads to your second question: MMO stands for "Massively Multiplayer Online," and usually has something appended to the end, such as "Massively Multiplayer Online Game." They don't necessarily have to be games, although with the prominence of games like World of Warcraft, games are typically what is thought of in relation to the phrase MMO. Some other examples of MMO environments might be Second Life or even Xbox Live.