Assessing Virtual Communities of Practice in Informal Learning Environments

There is an increasing interest in systematically assessing Online Social Learning (OSL) in informal environments. However, there is no agreement on how their performance and impact can be measured. Social Network Analysis (SNA) has been used to analyze OSL; however, limitations have been pointed out such as many studies apply SNA superficially, the sample size of the majority of them is small, and many studies are not grounded in any theoretical framework. This paper presents an approach to assess large Virtual Communities of Practice (VCoP) used in OSL. Our approach aims to systematize the process of assessing social interactions in VCoP based on the value creation theoretical framework. It combines SNA measures and analysis of the discussions' structure in order to identifying behavioral patterns associated to learning. The results point out a set of quantitative measures which shows that participation and ongoing collaboration have a fundamental role for VCoP knowledge-sharing in informal settings.