The Future of Education

Wb-Web is a German platform that specifically deals with pedagogical challenges, questions and networking possibilities for people engaging as continuing educators. According to findings from the wb-Personalmonitor (Martin et al., 2016), an ongoing monitoring study, there are about 530,000 continuing educators in Germany that could potentially benefit from such a web-based platform.
Launched in December 2014, the development of wb-web was based on a requirement analysis (N=1,305) and is now a registered trademark by the German Institute for Adult Education.
As almost all material is published under a cc-by-sa-license, wb-web contributes to the Open Educational Resources (OER) debate and offers an innovative repository of almost 1,000 content elements for the target audience.
Wb-Web is developing successfully: More than two years after launch, the platform reaches up to 35,000 users on average per month and has 650 registered community members (trend ascending). Even the last evaluation cycle (N=110) completed in autumn 2017, shows that our target group is very satisfied with the platform itself and the provided content. Particular emphasis was placed on the usefulness and timeliness as well as the easy access to the contents.
Although user satisfaction with the platform and its existing OER policy is high, users so far mainly focus on accessing and downloading content from wb-web. Only few users engage in regular discussions or publish their own materials on wb-web without being explicitly prompted to do so. This is also reflected in the last evaluation circle, where the target group recommended optimization of exchange and networking possibilities.
In order to expand engagement, collaboration and learning among and between users in terms of a community of practice (Wenger, 1998), wb-web recently (January 2018) updated the forum with a new software and new features with focus on fostering user interaction between community members and between community members and editorial staff. By involving experts as facilitators into discussions and addressing specific details of practice with adequate OER, we are confident to further cultivate the community practices and to gain users attention.
At the Conference, we are planning on reporting the recent developments with the wb-web community of practice.

Keywords: Communities of practice, networking, adult education. 

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