Cohesion, collaboration and the struggle of creating online learning communities: Development and validation of an online collective efficacy scale

Abstract

A number of strategies have emerged over the last decades to guide the development of online learning communities where members share, augment and co-create information but few tools to measure their success. This paper suggests that some online communities’ success can be understood through the lens of online collective efficacy. Albert Bandura introduced the idea of collective efficacy as an emergent variable where members have agency in community success. Collective efficacy sees group success as dependent on relationships between members of the group on two levels: the degree to which individuals feel that they able to contribute to the existing group, and the degree to which individuals perceive a fit between their own abilities, desires and goals and those of the other members of the group. The present paper describes the development and validation of a 35-item Likert-scale measure of online collective efficacy to capture this phenomenon. The Confirmatory Factor Analysis corroborated the fit of the data (n = 634) to the proposed theoretical structure of the scale (comprising 6 factors), and the convergence validity analysis yielded significant moderate correlations between the proposed scale and other instruments measuring related constructs. The developed measure has both descriptive value helping researchers/instructors understand the effectiveness of their strategies in managing online learning communities; and prescriptive value, helping offer guidance in how to move towards a more successful online community.