The Pareto Principle in virtual communities of learning
6 de March de 2023
Dr. Enric Serradell López, Dr. Pablo Lara Navarra and Dr. Silvia Martínez Martínez have recently published an article under the title “The Pareto Principle in Virtual Learning Communities”, in the journal Computers in Human Behavior.
This article talks about how in virtual learning communities, the need to generate social network analysis methods to investigate participation and knowledge sharing becomes evident.
What is the objective of the study?
The objective is to analyze the applicability and validity of the Pareto Principle in the field of online education. This classical principle, also called the 20/80 rule, describes the causes and effects of certain variables and proportions.
The article studies the correlation between academic results and knowledge sharing. Based on a sample of 184 members of the university community (including students and faculty) and 1354 messages.
The study is based on a dataset that records every interaction between community members, faculty and students, and the data were collected during one teaching semester (from February to July). Interaction means any action on a message, from sending, reading, forwarding, deleting, or replying to it. This article focuses on interactions in three communication spaces (forums, discussions, and the virtual classroom board).
Conclusions of the study
The results show that there is a relationship between the grade obtained and the monitoring of communication spaces in the classroom, since most of the small group of students with better academic results show higher message reading averages than the community as a whole.
Likewise, students who do not show up for the evaluation (17%) show the lowest average of readings, this group is followed by students who do not pass.
On the other hand, it should be noted that among students who pass the course with a high grade, there are also cases of low reading of messages shared in the classroom and, among those who do not pass, there are students with reading figures above the average.
Consult the study
You can read the full article for free by clicking here.
