Department

Instructional Technology

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

11-2-2020

Abstract

As a way to support teachers’ professional development activities and build communities of practice for teachers, education researchers and practitioners have put considerable effort into building an online learning community for K–12 teachers to create a venue to facilitate teachers’ joint knowledge construction. However, a substantial number of such online communities have failed due to lack of participation of members. Therefore, it is critical to understand how to design a sustainable community that fulfills members’ needs and elicits active participation of members. In this literature review, we adopted a sociological framework to investigate how to create a sustainable online community. This framework suggests that the sustainability of a community comes from individual members’ three types of commitments: instrumental, affective, and moral commitments. Such commitments are results of members’ cognitive, cathectic, and evaluative processes and lead to membership retainment, cohesive relationships, and socially regulated participation. Using this framework, we conducted a systematic literature review on online teacher community articles published from 1990 to 2018. Our findings provide insights on factors associated with teacher members’ instrumental, affective, and moral commitment to an online community. Based on these findings, we further provide design suggestions to build a sustainable community for teachers.

Journal Title

Sustainability

Journal ISSN

2071-1050

Volume

12

Issue

22

First Page

1

Last Page

25

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

10.3390/su12229742

Comments

This article received funding through Kennesaw State University's Faculty Open Access Publishing Fund, supported by the KSU Library System and KSU Office of Research.

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