Engagement in Social Learning: Detecting Engagement in Online Communities of Practice
The education in informal learning contexts is spreading over the world. In these contexts, from a pedagogical point of view, the most used approaches is the social learning and, in particular the communities of practice (CoP). From a technological point
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Abstract The education in informal learning contexts is spreading over the world. In these contexts, from a pedagogical point of view, the most used approaches is the social learning and, in particular the communities of practice (CoP). From a technological point of view, the social network is the framework most used to allow users to interact and to share resources. Several aspects have been identified as key factors for the success of the community, the engagement is one of the most important. Thus, in order to guarantee a successful learning process in a CoP it is necessary to detect and monitor user’s engagement in a continuous and unobtrusive way. The research proposes a model to detect and measure the engagement in online communities by means Social Learning Analytics from log files. Keywords Social network analysis practice
Social learning analytics Community of
1 Introduction Nowadays, a growing number of fields requires continue education: chronic disease management and workplace learning are only two examples. Thus learning can no longer be restricted to formal education. In these contexts, the use of Social Media is rising in order to support online communities thanks to their ability to connect people, to share information and to promote an effective social learning process. In the research field on online communities, several aspects have been identified as key factors for the success of the community as a whole and for each single E. Pesare (&) T. Roselli V. Rossano Università degli Studi di Bari Aldo Moro, Via Orabona 4, 70125 Bari, Italy e-mail: [email protected] T. Roselli e-mail: [email protected] V. Rossano e-mail: [email protected] © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2017 J.I. Kantola et al. (eds.), Advances in Human Factors, Business Management, Training and Education, Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing 498, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-42070-7_15
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component [1–4]. Since ever, the engagement is one of the basic factors for the success of the community, indeed it represents the focus of interest of the learning process research. Now its significance is rising also in informal learning contexts. In social learning, in particular in Communities of Practice (CoP), the engagement is strictly related to users’ participation and expertise in the domain. In this context, the ability to detect and monitor user’s engagement in a continuous but unobtrusive way is important (1) to allow the community manager to provide the users with the appropriate support; (2) to detect critical patterns; (3) to propose automate interventions to each participant. Engagement detection has been deeply studied in traditional learning contexts, with subjective or objective methods and approaches with different levels of invasiveness. In particular, objective methods based on measure collected on users actions and interactions, for example log files, have been successfully proposed in high constraints environments, such as ITS (Intelligent Tutoring Systems). F
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