Social Network Analysis of a Physics Faculty Online Learning Community

Abstract

We analyze the results of two surveys administered to a Faculty Online Learning Community teaching a common physics curriculum designed primarily for pre-service elementary teachers. We use Social Network Analysis to represent the faculty network and compare members’ closeness, a measure of how closely connected a person is with every other person in their network, to their reported experience in the community. We find that participants’ self-efficacy, as well as their teaching and sense of benefitting from the community, are predictors of their centrality in the network as measured by closeness with other participants