Social Network Analysis and Online Learning Communities in Higher Education: A Systematic Literature Review

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Social Network Analysis and Online Learning Communities in Higher Education: A Systematic Literature Review
Shazia K. Jan, Panos Vlachopoulos, Mitch Parsell, online learning, 2019/03/05
This study (16 page PDF) explores "the use of social network analysis (SNA) for investigating learning communities specifically, communities of practice (CoP) and community of inquiry (CoI) in higher education online learning (HEOL)." Enough three letter acronyms (TLA). The literature review is a decent if uninspired presentation of SNA and CoI (you'd think publications would find a way to just assume this and save authors from presenting the same summary in paper after paper). The paper selection is the usual unrepresentative sample from commercial publications. The authors find twn whole papers to study and conclude that there's "a very limited number of studies that bring together constructs from SNA and these community-based frameworks." That is probably not true, but how can you refute the search methodology. More...