Paper—Students’ Identities and its Relationships with their Engagement in an Online Learning Community Students’ Identities and its Relationships with their Engagement in an Online Learning Community https://doi.org/10.3991/ijet.v14i05.8196 Fariza Khalid Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, Bangi Selangor, Malaysia fariza.khalid@ukm.edu.my Abstract—Communities of practice’s approaches have been proven to be effective in enhancing students’ learning as well as helping them to cultivate in- ter-personal skills, especially within the higher education system. An important development in relation to participation in communities of practice is members’ identities. This study was conducted with the aim of understanding students’ identities in relation to their participation in an online community and how the dimensions of their identities correlated to each other. The research participants were 123 first-year students who were involved in collaborative sharing activi- ties via an online community, using Weebly. Data was collected using a set of questionnaires that discussed four main dimensions of identities: personal, pro- fessional, as learners, and as members of communities. Data was analysed using SPSS version 22. The overall findings offer a detailed description of students’ identities. A high positive correlation was found between students’ prior knowledge and their motivation, commitment and beliefs with regard to the benefits of online communities. The only dimension of students’ identities that lacked correlation with other dimensions was students’ openness. The findings highlight the importance of understanding different aspects of identities and how this helps to enhance engagement in online communities. The findings are significant in terms of establishing a deeper understanding on learning process within a social learning theory. Keywords—Online, communities of practice, social learning, motivation, ter- tiary education, identities. 1 Introduction In line with the existence of Internet connections and various Learning Manage- ment Systems (LMS) available today, online collaborative sharing activities are con- sidered an important activity to expand students’ knowledge and understanding. Through online discussions, assessment of students’ learning is also possible [1], [2]. An online learning community can be built through interaction among the members, i.e. through sharing thoughts, asking questions and providing feedback [3]. Sharing activities via online communities also allow greater flexibility than traditional, face- to-face mentoring; they save users’ time as the users do not have to travel, but can instead work from their classrooms or at home and at their own pace [4], [5]. [6] sug- 4 https://www.i-jet.org