by Nicolae Nistor ¹, Mihai Dascalu ², Lucia Larise Stavarache ², Yvonne Serafin ³, Stefan Trausan-Matu ²

• ¹ Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität
• ² University Politehnica of Bucharest
• ³ Universität der Bundeswehr München

nformallearninginonlineknowledgecommunities(OKCs)comprises visitor inquiries on specific topics. Learning can occur only if the OKC adequately respond. This study aims to predict OKC response, using a social learning analytics approach based on computational linguistics and Bakhtin’s theory of dialogism. Observing the blog topic (cooking vs. politics & economics) and the visitor inquiry format (off-topic vs. on-topic), a field experiment with a 2 × 2 factorial design was conducted on a sample of N = 68 blogger communities with a total of 25,303 members. For the entire sample, the community response was influenced only by the inquiry format. In a separate examination of experimental groups, only for one examined topic (cooking) this remained true, while for the other (politics & economics) the community response only depended on the previously established dialog quality. The findings suggest identification criteria for responsive communi‐ ties, which can support OKC integration in learning environments.