Beyond Communities of Practice: An Emerging Framework for Institutional Support Communities in Pre-Service Teacher Education

Online communities in higher education have been studied predominantly through four theoretical lenses—Communities of Inquiry, Communities of Practice, MOOCs, and Personal Learning Networks—yet a large class of empirically widespread spaces falls outside all four: institutionally-managed digital environments that accompany predominantly in-presence curricular pathways with information, coordination and operational materials. This paper proposes Institutional Support Communities (ISCs) as an emerging fifth category, distinguished by five operationalised constitutive dimensions. We illustrate the framework through a multi-method Learning Analytics study of a six-month dataset (n = 1,169 active students, 49,655 access events, 148 content items) from a Blackboard community supporting students enrolled in the Italian Primary Education Sciences degree. Five findings characterise this community as a prototypical ISC: low Louvain modularity (0.115) revealing stellar information centrality; long-tail participation asymmetry (Gini = 0.482); four data-driven temporal change-points coinciding with academic-calendar milestones; near-absence of dialogic interaction (forum reach below 3% of the cohort); and bipolar institutional governance with no traceable mentor teachers. K-means clustering identifies four robust within-ISC membership types whose Kaplan–Meier survival trajectories differ markedly (log-rank χ²(3) = 1993.7, p < .001). The framework is proposed as emerging and explicitly invites replication across institutional contexts.