Exploring Social Influence on the Usage of Resources in an Online Learning Community

This research investigates the usage distribution of instructional resources shared among educators in an online learning community. The usage of a resource is defined by the number of unique educators who use (click on) it. We explored what the usage distribution of these resources looks like and we investigated what underlying mechanisms may have generated the observed distribution. Our results indicate that the usage distribution of resources follows a power law. Furthermore, our results also suggest that an educator’s decision to use a resource may be influenced by the prior decisions of others. 82.6% of 2500 simulations of an information cascade model developed to model the resource selection process of educators resulted in a power law distribution as observed in our data. Information cascades provide a natural way of understanding how individuals may imitate the decisions of others even when such decisions do not align with their perssonal preferences.