Lurkers Versus Posters: Investigation of the Participation Behaviors in Online Learning Communities

Abstract

Nowadays online learning communities (OLC) have been thought of as a great source of learning contents by many users in various areas such as online forums, question answering, and online social networks. Millions of posts are virally shared among different users in online social communities every day; however, different types of users deal with these posts in various ways in which, the users are divided into two categories: posters and lurkers. Lurker users join in an online community and watch other posts without performing any activities (or rarely activities). On the contrary, poster users actively participate in the creation and repost of information in online learning communities. The aim of this chapter is to investigate the lurking behaviors in educational networking or online communities in order to identify the factors influencing the participating behavior in such communities on social media. Therefore, first we introduce the role of online learning communities in educational networks and also present a bibliometric analysis. Then relevant theories and factors are reviewed, and a mathematical solution is proposed to increase the participation of learners in the transmission of information through reposting. The proposed solution encourage lurking learners to participate in content reposting. Comprehensive evaluations indicated that the proposed method had significantly solved the presented challenges.