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Top1 Introduction
Online communities have emerged from technology-based forums and are rooted in environments where individuals and organizations with common interests exchange information and knowledge (Autio, Esmt, & Frederiksen, 2013). As the Internet and mobile technology have become increasingly ubiquitous, the development and emergence of online communities has grown significantly and is now supported by a wide range of web products and services (Malinen, 2015).
The advantages of online communities are numerous in terms of collaborative work, knowledge transfer and information ubiquity (Fisher, 2019), but their success depends heavily on their members' participation (Faraj, Jarvenpaa & Majchrzak, 2011). This raises several challenges, including strategies to keep the participants motivated in the community (Malinen, 2015). The information and communication overload may be an issue in online communities (Pirkkalainen & Salo, 2016; Zhang, 2018) and may jeopardize their sustainable interaction (Ouardi et al., 2016; Ramadan & Abosag, 2017).
Currently, higher education institutions may be seen as online communities (Kent, Rechavi, & Rafaeli, 2019; Witzig, Spencer, & Myers, 2017) because of the digital transformation they are facing (Santos, Batista, & Marques, 2019b). Thus, information and communication overload can also be seen in this context. For example, students often feel more overloaded in courses that use e-learning environments compared to traditional classroom courses that do not use such online communities (Kushnir, 2009). In the same vein, Chen, Pedersen and Murphy (2011) describe that students are more overloaded in virtual learning environment courses than in traditional classroom courses. In online education, overload is a significant factor in interactions between teachers and students.
However, information and communication overload is not an issue that has been researched substantially with regard to its effects or strategies for dealing with the information produced and shared through participation in this type of online community (Kearns, Frey, Tomer, & Alman, 2014).
This paper presents part of the results of a more comprehensive research project that analysed how students and teachers from higher education institutions use communication technologies (CT) to communicate (Santos, Batista, & Marques, 2019a, 2019b). On this paper, the results on the perception of the communication overload that students and teachers perceive through CT are described and discussed, subject to the following:
Figure 1 presents the research model, indicating the main stages of the research and the approach followed. A literature review was carried out (section 2) and the methodology to be applied was defined (section 3). Following the methodology, data were collected, and the results were produced (section 4) which were the subject of analysis and discussion, supporting the answer to the research question (section 5). Finally, the conclusions of this investigation and some future research directions are described in section 6.
Figure 1.
The research model followed during this research
Top2 Literature Review
The concept of Communication Overload is often associated with the concept of Information Overload, being practically inseparable since the communication process presupposes the transmission of information. A bibliometric analysis has shown that information overload and communication overload problems are nowadays interrelated (Batista & Marques, 2017).