Learning analytics view of teachers’ activity in a large online professional community

Informal learning and knowledge maturation are practices influenced by individual and contextual constraints and anchored in long-term and dynamic relationships between technologies, people and communities. By engaging in online networks, teachers could foster connections between different contexts, find interesting resources and enable the generation of ideas. The eTwinning community is the main digital European professional network for teachers, with more than 1 million registered European users. The present study aims to analyse participation in the Italian eTwinning community through the monitoring of teachers’ activities to investigate possible co-occurrences between access, use of tools and other learning opportunities that the eTwinning system offers to its members. Analyses of the online behaviour of 20.541 active Italian users were undertaken using anonymized data extracted from the eTwinning platform for six months before the Covid 19 pandemic. Pearson’s r coefficient was used to analyse the linear relationship between variables and was intended to identify associations between the program’s uses. Correlation analyses of the measures revealed a correspondence among the several dimensions of the eTwinning experience, showing positive and strong associations between different elements of active membership, such as the application of collaborative teaching through projects and involvement in thematic groups or the density of the contacts’ network and access to online resources.