摘要：Distance education has become one of the popular choices among the student's community. More and more students are enrolling into various distance education courses. Technology advancements have created a new avenue in distance education. ICT has helped the universities and colleges in reducing the distance between the students and faculty members. Many of these ICT technologies replicate the physical classroom setup in an online environment. The adoption of social networking sites (SNS) such as LinkedIn, Facebook is increasing rapidly at a much faster phase among the student's community. An increasing number of faculty members in the higher education space have been using these social networking tools in combination with other tools for education delivery and knowledge sharing. Social networking tools are used for building a community of practice among the students enrolled in the program and the faculty members. There is not much research around maximizing the benefits of the use of these social networking platforms and improving the effectiveness of learning. This study aimed to find out the attributes which are vital for making most of these online communities of practice tools and come up with a framework. The researcher performed qualitative research. A carefully designed online questionnaire was sent to a sample set 2000 users and responses were received from 410 users. The researcher used PLS-SEM Model for this research. The outcome of the study revealed that Quality of the Platform and Quality of the content are the critical factors for making most of the COP/SNS platforms. Easy of Navigation and language used for making the content scored high when compared to other attributes.
关键词：Online Communities of Practice; Social Networking; Learning Technology; Distance Education; Social Learning
