Simple and Computational Heuristics for Forum Management in the NSTA Learning Center: A Role for Learning Analytics in Online Communities of Practice Supporting Teacher Learning

Prior research has demonstrated that the quality of moderation and management in online communities of practice is key to their successful support of learning. However, as communities grow in size and complexity, it becomes increasingly difficult for unaided experts to fully understand and take action in response to the activity of participants within them. Learning analytics has the potential to provide the support that community of practice leaders need to improve their performance. The National Science Teachers Association and U.S. Department of Education´s Connected Educators project are exploring three approaches for managing forums to make them accessible and to synthesize the knowledge they generate: archiving, summarizing, and reorganizing. This paper describes manual heuristics for the first two of these, as well as the use of social network analysis to help develop algorithms to automate the third, community forum reorganization.