The Future of Education

Identifying a community of practice is not always an easy task. A community of practice, understood "as a group of people who share a common interest, a problem or a passion for a particular subject, and who deepen their knowledge about it, interacting with each other over time" (Wenger, Mcdermott, And Snyder, 2002, p.4), is a theoretical abstraction constituted by a set of characteristics that allow us to affirm whether or not we are in the presence of a community of practice. It is not enough to have a group of people working together to say that we are in the presence of a community of practice. Based on this assumption, and the concept of CoP introduced by Wenger, we present the results of an investigation developed since 2017 to identify the characteristics of an online platform that promotes and is a catalyst for a CoP.
Methodologically, a case study was used.

Participants: platform users registered (N = 896) with at least one case solved in the case of students, or at least one case submitted to specialist and reviewer profiles.

Instruments: Online questionnaire to check users' sense of belonging to a COP; Platform forum 

The results obtained allow us to conclude that the users of the platform assume as members of a community of practice. They perceive learning as the great value of the platform followed by mutual commitment, shared repertoire and, at a lower level, they consider that they form a stable group with strong interpersonal relationships. This difficulty is in accordance with the way the platform has been used. In addition, some technical constraints are mentioned, such as the non-integration of the forum with the platform, which leads to the need for a new registration, which inhibits greater communication by the members. Therefore, it is unanimous the value that a tool of this type assumes for health professionals, however, there is a need to introduce some additional mechanisms, such as automatic feedback, and forum integration into the platform without the need for new authentication.

Keywords: Communities of Practice, social learning, e-learning;

References:
[1] Murillo, E. (2008). Searching Usenet for virtual communities of practice: using mixed methods to identify the constructs of  Wenger’s theory. Information Research, 13(4).
[2] Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of practice : learning, meaning, and identity. (1.a ed.). New York: Cambridge University  Press.
[3] Wenger, E., Mcdermott, R., & Snyder, W. M. (2002). Cultivating Communities of Practice (1.a ed.). Boston: Harvard  Business Press.