Knowledge Management and Reuse in Virtual Learning Communities

Abstract

One of the main sources of knowledge in the web is the social networks and especially online communitie because they contain human experiences which are considered as a rich source of information. This knowledge is in the most cases unstructured and is in the form of discussions organized generally by topics. The aim of this paper is to propose a process of knowledge extraction and Management in Online or Virtual Communities. With the widespread of communities in social media due to the services provided by those technologies, many of those communities are in the form of Learning communities created by expert to share knowledge about a topic of their interest. The knowledge shared by members in the online communities is unfortunately not structured and not capitalized. Many members try to access and learn from the shared knowledge in the community but cannot benefit from it due to its unstructured form. If that knowledge could be represented and stored in order to be reused, it would facilitate the knowledge acquisition by members. For this purpose, the present paper try to analyze the studies that treat the question of extracting and managing knowledge in Online Learning Communities based on several criteria exposed all along this paper. Then we propose a framework for managing knowledge in Virtual Learning communities inspired from the different previous frameworks presented in the analyzed studies, and try to propose and approach to overpass the different challenges present in the actual knowledge Management processes of Virtual Communities.