The Virtual Community of Practice Facilitation Model: A Conceptual Framework for Healthcare Professional Education

Literature Review

A recent comprehensive review of literature found that VCoPs offer an informal method of professional development for healthcare professionals and can also decrease professional and social isolation (McLoughlin et al., 2018). Discussion forums, online facilitators, and videoconferencing have been shown as effective strategies for engaging participants and managing content and resources (Bermejo-Caja et al., 2019). Wenger (2011) suggested the following five elements as critical for CoP design:

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  The CoP should have active members who are practitioners, or “experts,” in the specific domain of interest.

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  Members must participate in a process of collective learning within their domain.

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  Social structures must be facilitated within the community to assist in knowledge creation, sharing, and collaboration.

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  Instruction-based learning and group discourse should be used as learning strategies for community members.

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  Communication and interaction between community members must be facilitated and maintained over a sufficient learning time period. This could be through regular meetings, sharing of case studies, file sharing services, discussion forums, or other online tools.