Critical factors towards analysing teachers' presence in on-line learning communities

• This paper reports on the design framework of a teacher community of learning consisted of computer science teachers. The architecture of a new integrated platform developed to support the teacher community is also presented
• From the methodological perspective, a three-dimensional analysis framework was proposed based on a) descriptive analysis of log data extracted from the community platform, b) Social Network Analysis of teachers' individual contributions, and c) analysis of the teachers' views and perceptions of their learning experience within the community.
• The analysis revealed important information regarding critical indicators of teachers' presence within the community, e.g. members' participation, engagement, interaction and cohesion.

On-line teacher communities constitute a very popular and dynamic field while they foster a new philosophy for professional development which is characterised as associative, constructivist, reflective, situated, collaborative, and connectivist. This paper reports on the design and the implementation of a learning community consisting of computer science teachers teaching in primary and secondary public schools (K–9), in Greece. The conceptual and the operational dimensions of the on-line community design framework are presented in detail. The architecture of an integrated platform, developed to support the teacher community, as well as the tools and the features it incorporates are also outlined. Finally, we present the findings of a pilot study concerning teachers' presence within the community as well as their views and perceptions of community learning. The results provided supportive evidence of the effectiveness of the design framework and revealed important information with regard to critical indicators of teachers' learning presence within the community, i.e. members' participation, engagement, interaction and cohesion.