Abstract
The potential of using online communities to support continuous teacher professional development (PD) remains controversial. We conducted two interconnected analyses of an eight-year community on Facebook by analyzing 2900 posts containing 53,709 keywords from 296 active teachers and professors. In the content-level analysis, we focused on teacher knowledge, identifying five categories (Person-based perception, Person-based knowledge, Environment-based perception, Environment-based knowledge, and Professional development programs). The consistent prominence of curriculum knowledge and reflection over the years demonstrates how online communities contribute to continuous PD. In the participation-level analysis, we focused on post contribution, finding that since the fourth year, formal leaders were no longer the primary content contributors. Over the last two years, prominent contributions from members and academics/specialists have signaled a shift toward distributed participation and underscored importance of professionalism. We propose a Professional Development Loop for Online Professional Learning Communities to explain how a large-scale online community expands or diminishes.
•Eight-year data confirms online PLCs foster teacher professional development.•Post content focused on curriculum knowledge and reflection.•Obvious transition to broad contribution and distributed leadership.•Influence of members, academics, and specialists surpassed formal leaders.•Proposed a Professional Development Loop for online PLCs.