Strengthening the Community in Order to Enhance Learning

Abstract

Many online communities have the problem that they are highly dependent on a small core group of users, as well as are highly inefficient in handling requests for collaboration, resulting in a lower willingness to help and less activity. Both problems have far reaching consequences in the case of learning networks (LN) for online learners. A LN cannot exist without a strong community at its heart. Therefore we propose to introduce short goal-specific communities called Ad Hoc Transient Communities (AHTC) in order to restructure the community in such a way that there will be more ties between learners, less dependence on a core group, and more effective handling of requests through the use of matching. This will result in a decentralized community structure with higher activity, which makes the community stronger.